Sam Clemens - Twain Project

Sam Clemens was born two months premature, thin and sickly. Haley’s comet appeared the night he was born – a sign his mother took as an omen of good fortune. His father was humorless, a chronically bad businessman. His mother loved to dance, loved music and telling tall tales. His sister and brother died as children, scarred him. Every year he was sent to his uncle’s farm in summer, an old slave named Uncle Daniel and Aunt Hanna taught him songs and stories.

Sam believed from an early age that if we were going to be a country, if America was going to be a Nation as it had started out to be, the problem of race had to be solved.
He was always moving, always restless, full of contradictions.

At 14, after his dad got pneumonia and died, he got a job at the Hannibal Journal working for Orion as the printer’s apprentice. For two and a half years, Orion never paid the 3.50 a week he promised his little brother.

By the time he was 17, Hannibal was too confining. Work only made this more clear for him, as seen the time May 6, 1853 when he published in the Hannibal Journal, “TERRIBLE ACCIDENT! 500 MEN KILLED AND MISSING!! We had set the above head up, expecting of course to use it, but as the accident hasn’t happened, yet, we’ll say (To be Continued,)”

He wanted to see adventures, and if not live them, invent them. In Nevada he got to do all three at once.

But first he was a Steamboatman on the Mississippi. He talked his way into a job as an apprentice. Worked his way up to a Cub. He sent for Henry his little brother to be a clerk at the riverboat company. Took Henry away from Orion. Sam and Henry were to meet at St. Louis, but Henry’s boat exploded, killing him at 19. Humorlessly, on a mission, Sam became a pilot in order to be an absolute monarch. The Civil War ended all commercial traffic on the Mississippi.

Orion had campaigned for Lincoln. Sam joined a makeshift Confederate Regiment to piss Orion off and also out of boredom. Sam mostly hid in the woods avoiding Union Troops. When his “regiment” disbanded and it’s members joined the real Confederate Army, Sam fled.

Orion was rewarded with the Nevada post. Sam, 25 begged Orion to take him along. It was 1861.

In July, the brothers left from St. Joseph, Missouri on a stagecoach. Crossed Kansas, Nebraska. Three weeks journey. They went to Carson City. Sam had no pay as the Secretary’s secretary. He tried to mine for silver. Failed. He moved to Virginia City, Nevada. A silver boom town of the comstock lode.

Virginia City had the biggest newspaper between Chicago and San Francisco, the Territorial Enterprise. Sam got a job as a local reporter for $25/wk. His haunts were saloons, theatres, whorehouses. The writers were proto-counter-culture avant guard experimenters in the art of newspapers and popular entertainment. Tall tales, lies, hoaxes and great writing was infused into the culture in Nevada. They took part in 5pm ‘green hour’ meetings at a bar called “The Sazerac” which had a dark parlor room for absinthe.

The editor of the Territorial Enterprise was Will Wright, alias Dan DeQuille http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_DeQuille was the mastermind of this new way. Active mythology. Emulating DeQuille, took on a new name, just before he had to flee Nevada. Mark Twain.

Sam Clemens, as the little brother of a local political bigwig was a little untouchable. Sam worked in the silver mines and wrote stories about the life.

In 1868 Mark Twain reminisced and wrote about his journalism and writing career in Nevada with the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise:

“To find a petrified man, or break a stranger’s leg, or cave an imaginary mine, or discover some dead Indians in a Gold Hill tunnel, or massacre a family at Dutch Nick’s, were feats and calamities that we never hesitated about devising when the public needed matters of thrilling interest for breakfast. The seemingly tranquil ENTERPRISE office was a ghastly factory of slaughter, mutilation and general destruction in those days.”
– Mark Twain’s Letters from Washington, Number IX, Territorial Enterprise, March 7, 1868

Today very few copies of the Territorial Enterprise from Mark Twain’s days exist. Much of Twain’s writing for the Enterprise survives only as undated clippings from his personal scrapbooks or as reprints from contemporary newspapers of his time.

The Nevada Territory was suffering an economic depression. The mines were shutting down, the population of the once-great Comstock silver lode was hemorrhaging to California, and Sam likely was just another of the departing pilgrims seeking greener pastures. Towns were full of abandoned, half-built homes and stores.

Sam had resigned his commission as a notary public in Virginia City in April 1864. Moreover, Clemens’ popularity on the Comstock was in decline. And finally, he was restless and anxious to move on; “I wanted to see San Francisco,” he later wrote in Roughing It (1872). “I wanted to go somewhere. I wanted- I did not know what I wanted. I had spring fever and wanted a change, principally, no doubt.”

Samuel Clemens, while in charge of the Enterprise in his editor’s absence, made trouble for himself in May 1864. Clemens, during a drinking spree, wrote an article facetiously suggesting that money raised by prominent Carson City women for the Sanitary Fund–a Civil War relief organization that helped care for sick and wounded soldiers and their families–went to an eastern miscegenation society and that the rival Virginia City Daily Union was not meeting its pledges to the fund. Fellow reporter William Wright, a.k.a. Dan DeQuille, had convinced Clemens not to publish the injudicious story. However, while Clemens was briefly out of the Enterprise office, the foreman found the copy on a table and assumed it was left there to be published.

The Carson City socialites were incensed and wrote a scathing letter to the Enterprise demanding to know who wrote the article. Union owner James Laird, serving as editor in the absence of his regular editor, angrily rebutted Clemens’ indiscrete claims. In his Autobiography, Clemens, late in life, wrote that the feud with Laird became so intense that he challenged Laird to a duel and then, thinking better of it, fled Nevada Territory to avoid arrest for violating the anti-dueling law.

There were some articles written about duels in the Comstock newspapers, but they smack of the kind of journalistic jibes and pranks of which Clemens and his colleagues were fond. (“By the privileges of our order,” he once said, “we are independent of facts” — which explains where some of these pieces of Nevada folklore come from.) The fact that Clemens and his pal Steve Gillis embellished the duel yarn as the years passed lends support to the view that the abortive duel may have hastened Clemens’ departure but it was not the sole reason he left for California.

He needed money to travel and tried to sell off family land back in Tennessee but Orion refused on the grounds that it might be used for immoral wine production. Orion was a moralist but also wanted to keep his brother near. Sam skipped town and the capitol socialites connected the dots on who had written the letter, Orion felt the fallout.

In San Francisco, Sam, now Mark Twain, got into trouble again for his tongue. He wrote an article speaking out against white violence against Asian workers in California. When his editors refused to print it, Twain sent the article back to the Territorial Enterprise. It’s publication resulted in a libel suit. Twain was arrested for public drunkenness. Whether he was teetering on the verge of alcoholism or just that indiscretions were used against him by his enemies is uncertain.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in 1835 in Florida, Missouri, and raised there in the eastern part of the state. His schooling was minimal; he was essentially self-taught. As a teenager, he worked for local newspapers, and then for printing shops in Cincinnati and other eastern cities. In 1857, now twenty-one, Sam persuaded Horace Bixby, a Mississippi River steamboat pilot, to accept him as an apprentice. Sam sailed up and down the Mississippi first as an apprentice, then as a full-fledged pilot until the advent of the Civil War, when hostilities closed the river to civilian traffic. Clemens fled the oncoming holocaust by attaching himself as a secretary to his brother Orion, who had just been appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory and was leaving for Carson City on July 21, 1861.

Soon tiring of working for his brother, Sam was attracted to the prospect of becoming rich by prospecting for gold and silver. The work turned out to be unexpectedly arduous and unprofitable, as did another job in a stamping mill. While he toiled at these physical jobs during the day, Sam took to writing humorous sketches at night, and sent them to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. A particularly clever satire caught the eye of Joe Goodman, the newspaper’s editor. Goodman offered him a job as a reporter, and Sam accepted with alacrity. His literary career had begun.

The Enterprise was already the outstanding newspaper of the Comstock Lode, and on its way to becoming one of the best in the country. It attracted the best writing talent in the area by offering high wages and unusual freedom of discretion. Besides its owners, Joe Goodman and Denis McCarthy, both unusually self-possessed young men of integrity, ability, and ambition, the Enterprise also employed William Wright, the best writer on the Comstock, who used the penname of Dan De Quille. Other employees included the combative editorialist Rollin Daggett, the printer Steve Gillis, and a number of other transient but talented Sagebrush journalists. Sam and De Quille became roommates, and under De Quille’s experienced but gentle tutelage and Goodman’s inspiration, Sam quickly absorbed what De Quille had to teach him and soon revealed himself as the possessor of original genius. He adopted the penname of Mark Twain and within months was producing works of humor that rivaled De Quille’s.

In 1864, Twain moved to California, worked for such papers as San Francisco’s Call and the Alta California, and the Sacramento Union, while continuing to send contributions to the Territorial Enterprise. Twain’s years in Nevada and California ultimately became the basis for the main group of chapters of Roughing It (1872). In 1866, The Sacramento Union engaged him to write a series of travel letters from Hawaii, which became the latter chapters of Roughing It.

In 1867 the Alta California in return for another series of travel letters paid Twain’s fare on the steamship Quaker City, which left New York in June with a group of well-to-do tourists for a 164-day excursion to the Azore Islands and an itinerary of visits to ports on the Mediterranean and Black Seas. Twain was part of a small band of passengers on that voyage who scorned the wealthy and sanctimonious culture of the majority. His satirical account of the trip became The Innocents Abroad (1869). The book was a success and from then on Twain’s reputation as an author steadily grew.

Twain’s early career was eventful. In 1870, he married Olivia Langdon of Elmira, New York, and started family life in Buffalo, New York, where he was part-owner of a newspaper. In 1871, he sold his house and share in the newspaper and moved to Hartford, Connecticut, a prestigious cultural center. All the while, Twain was a prolific writer and promoted himself by collecting his short works and publishing them as books. His first book, for example, was The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1869). Among the highlights of his early career, in addition to those already mentioned, were The Gilded Age (1874) and, especially, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Although most of his books were regarded as humorous, recent scholarship has established a dark side to his writing, an ambivalent and deeper level of continuous engagement with serious ideas that is concealed by the sugar-coating of surface humor.

In 1883, his middle period under way, Twain wrote Life on the Mississippi, a memorable account of his associations with that mighty river, and in 1884-85 (in British and American editions), he published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, his most famous work. Among other books, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court came out in 1889, and Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins in 1894.

Twain’s last period, the latter 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century, is characterized by works that show with increasing obviousness his disillusion with life and God: Following the Equator (1897), the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts (1897-1908), and Letters from the Earth (1909), and short stories and essays of social, political, and theological criticism.

At the time of his death in 1910, Twain was easily America’s most beloved author. Since then, his reputation has increased by becoming not only America’s most respected author, but also one of world literature’s giants. Scholarship has discovered depths and shadows in his writing where before had only been noticed a bright and cheery surface. Famous studies of his literature pointed out the biographical importance of two periods of his life: the Matter of Hannibal and the Matter of the River. To this has recently been added the Matter of the West, which demonstrates that the years Twain spent in Nevada and California were formative ones for his thought and art. Now that much Sagebrush literature is being recovered, it is possible to recognize Twain’s assimilation of distinctive Sagebrush attitudes and techniques, most especially that of the hoax. He came to incorporate hoaxes into most of his major literature for he found them to be perfect covers for his dark and ironic philosophy. His literature thus combines a genius for humor with profound despair.

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Samuel Langhorne Clemens is one of the nation’s most beloved authors. As Mark Twain, he wrote such classics as Tom Sawyer (1876), Huckleberry Finn (1884), and The Prince and the Pauper (1881). His life and career are the property of several states including Nevada, which played an essential role in his development.

Clemens was born in Missouri in 1835, growing up on the banks of the Mississippi River. With the outbreak of the Civil War and like many with no appetite for battle, Clemens looked west. In 1861, the eldest son of the family, Orion Clemens, joined Governor James Nye to form a government for the newly created Nevada Territory. Orion served as secretary. Samuel accompanied his brother to Carson City, hoping for employment in civil service. He found none.

Samuel Clemens failed at mining in Unionville and Aurora. In 1862, while scraping by in Aurora, Clemens used the penname “Josh” to correspond with the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City. His witty observations inspired editor Joseph Goodman to employ Clemens as a reporter in September of that year.

In Missouri, Clemens had experimented with the literary hoax, but at the Enterprise, he perfected the art, emulating talented veteran journalists. He became close friends with fellow reporter William Wright, who wrote as Dan De Quille. The two shared a room and antics.

Based in Virginia City and occasionally reporting from Carson City and San Francisco, Clemens fabricated stories including discussions about a petrified man and a ghastly massacre in Empire City. Covering the territorial legislature, Clemens helped form the “Third House,” a deliberative body of fellow journalists who met at session’s end to mock the lawmakers. During this time, Clemens began to explore his talent for giving humorous presentations.

In an Enterprise article from February 1863, Clemens first used the byline Mark Twain, apparently a reference to shallow, but safe, navigable waters. In December, he met Artemus Ward, an eastern humorist often regarded as the first stand-up comic. Ward came to Virginia City to present his nationally-famous lecture “The Babes in the Wood.” He recognized Twain’s talent, moved into his place for roughly a week, tore up the town, and encouraged the fledgling author to break away from the Comstock.

In the spring of 1864, Twain became embroiled in a dispute over one of his libelous hoaxes, which thrived at the fine line between humor and outrage. Facing growing anger and challenges to duel, Twain left Virginia City in May 1864.

As an emerging national humorist, Twain returned to Virginia City in 1866 and 1868 to lecture at the Maguire/Piper Opera House. He also used his western sojourn as inspiration for Roughing It (1872), a book that flowed between fact and fiction. The author’s Nevada experience was far more than the source of anecdotes and the birthplace of a penname. For Twain, the cosmopolitan Comstock proved the perfect training ground with its thriving literary tradition that exploited the western tall tale to its utmost.