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Heres whyLearn More Its December 1st and the march towards the holidays begins as we belatedly note the birth date of Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, November 30, 1835, Florida, MissouriApril 21, 1910, Redding, Connecticut, American humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who acquired international fame for his travel narratives, especially The Innocents Abroad 1869, Roughing It 1872, and Life on the Mississippi 1883, and for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 1876 and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1885.Samuel Clemens, the sixth child of John Marshall and Jane Lampton Clemens, was born two months prematurely and was in relatively poor health for the first 10 years of his life. His mother tried various allopathic and hydropathic remedies on him during those early years, and his recollections of those instances along with other memories of his growing up would eventually find their way into Tom Sawyer and other writings.Clemens father, John Clemens, by all reports was a serious man who seldom demonstrated affection. No doubt his temperament was affected by his worries over his financial situation, made all the more distressing by a series of business failures. It was the diminishing fortunes of the Clemens family that led them in 1839 to move 30 miles east from Florida, Missouri, to the Mississippi River port town of Hannibal, where there were greater opportunities.Perhaps it was the romantic visionary in him that caused Clemens to recall his youth in Hannibal with such fondness. As he remembered it in Old Times on the Mississippi 1875, the village was a white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summers morning, until the arrival of a riverboat suddenly made it a hive of activity. The gamblers, stevedores, and pilots, the boisterous raftsmen and elegant travelers, all bound for somewhere surely glamorous and exciting, would have impressed a young boy and stimulated his already active imagination.Clemens and his friends played at being pirates, Robin Hood, and other fabled adventurers. Among those companions was Tom Blankenship, an affable but impoverished boy whom Twain later identified as the model for the character Huckleberry Finn. There were local diversions as wellfishing, picnicking, and swimming. A boy might swim or canoe to and explore Glasscocks Island, in the middle of the Mississippi River, or he might visit the labyrinthine McDowells Cave, about 2 miles south of town. The first site evidently became Jacksons Island in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the second became McDougals Cave in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In the summers, Clemens visited his uncle John Quarless farm, near Florida, Missouri, where he played with his cousins and listened to stories told by the slave Uncle Daniel, who served, in part, as a model for Jim in Huckleberry Finn.In many ways the childhood of Samuel Clemens was a rough one. Death from disease during this time was common. His sister Margaret died of a fever when Clemens was four years old three years later his brother Benjamin died. When he was eight, a measles epidemic potentially lethal in those days was so frightening to him that he deliberately exposed himself to infection by climbing into bed with his friend Will Bowen in order to relieve the anxiety. A cholera epidemic a few years later killed at least 24 people, a substantial number for a small town.In 1847 Clemenss father died of pneumonia. John Clemenss death contributed further to the familys financial instability. Even before that year, however, continuing debts had forced them to auction off property, to sell their only slave, Jennie, to take in boarders, and to sell their furniture.After the death of his father, Sam Clemens worked at several odd jobs in town, and in 1848 he became a printers apprentice for Joseph P. Aments Missouri Courier.Having acquired a trade by age 17, Clemens left Hannibal in 1853 with some degree of self-sufficiency. He worked briefly as a typesetter in St. Louis in 1853 before traveling to New York City to work at a large printing shop. From there he went to Philadelphia and on to Washington, D.C. then he returned to New York. In 1857, he persuaded the accomplished riverboat captain Horace Bixby to take him on as a riverboat apprentice. Having agreed to pay a 500 apprentice fee, Clemens studied the Mississippi River and the operation of a riverboat under the masterful instruction of Bixby, and ultimately became an experienced riverboat pilot.The Civil War severely curtailed river traffic, and, fearing that he might be impressed as a Union gunboat pilot, Clemens brought his years on the river to a halt a mere two years after he had acquired his license and returned to Hannibal. Clemens brother, Orion Clemens, was deeply involved in Republican Party politics and in Abraham Lincolns campaign for the U.S. presidency, and it was as a reward for those efforts that he was appointed territorial secretary of Nevada. Upon their arrival in Carson City, the territorial capital, Sam Clemenss association with Orion did not provide him the sort of livelihood he might have supposed, and, once again, he had to shift for himselfmining and investing in timber and silver and gold stocks.The Nevada Territory was a rambunctious and violent place during the boom years of the Comstock Lode, from its discovery in 1859 to its peak production in the late 1870s. Nevertheless, Clemens seems to have retained something of his moral integrity. He was often indignant and prone to expose fraud and corruption when he found them. In February 1863 Clemens covered the legislative session in Carson City and wrote three letters for the Enterprise. He signed them Mark Twain. It would be several years before this pen name would acquire the firmness of a full-fledged literary persona, however. In the meantime, he was discovering by degrees what it meant to be a literary person.Already he was acquiring a reputation outside the territory. Some of his articles and sketches had appeared in New York papers, and he became the Nevada correspondent for the San Francisco Morning Call. Clemens went to the Tuolumne foothills to do some mining. It was there that he heard the story of a jumping frog. The story was widely known, but it was new to Clemens, and he took notes for a literary representation of the tale. When he was invited to contribute something for a book of humorous sketches, Clemens decided to write up the story which was published in the New York Saturday Press in November 1865 and was subsequently reprinted throughout the country. Mark Twain had acquired sudden celebrity.Clemens continued to write for newspapers, traveling to Hawaii for the Sacramento Union and also writing for New York newspapers, but he apparently wanted to become something more than a journalist. He went on his first lecture tour, speaking mostly on the Sandwich Islands Hawaii in 1866. It was a success, and for the rest of his life, though he found touring grueling, he knew he could take to the lecture platform when he needed money. In 1867, he moved to New York City, serving as the traveling correspondent for the San Francisco Alta California and for New York newspapers. He embarked on a transatlantic excursion to Europe and the Holy Land eventually his account of the voyage was published as The Innocents Abroad 1869 which was a great success.Clemenss courtship of Olivia Langdon, the daughter of a prosperous businessman from Elmira, New York, was an ardent one, conducted mostly through correspondence. They were married in February 1870. He worked hard on a book about his experiences in the West. Roughing It was published in February 1872 and sold well. Clemens subsequently began work with his friend Charles Dudley Warner on a satirical novel about political and financial corruption in the United States. The Gilded Age 1873 was well received, and a play based on the most amusing character from the novel, Colonel Sellers, also became quite popular.The Gilded Age was Twains first attempt at a novel, and he soon began writing Tom Sawyer, along with his reminiscences about his days as a riverboat pilot. The Clemens family moved into their still-unfinished house in Nook Farm in Hartford, Connecticut later the same year, counting among their neighbours writer Harriet Beecher Stowe.Old Times on the Mississippi appeared in the Atlantic in installments in 1875. Old Times, which would later become a portion of Life on the Mississippi, described comically, but a bit ruefully, a way of life that would never return. The highly episodic narrative of Tom Sawyer, which recounts the mischievous adventures of a boy growing up along the Mississippi River, was colored by a nostalgia for childhood and simplicity that would permit Twain to characterize the novel as a hymn to childhood.The continuing popularity of Tom Sawyer it sold well from its first publication, in 1876, and has never gone out of print indicates that Twain could write a novel that appealed to young and old readers alike. The antics and high adventure of Tom Sawyer and his comradesincluding pranks in church and at school, the comic courtship of Becky Thatcher, a murder mystery, and a thrilling escape from a cavecontinue to delight children, while the books comedy, narrated by someone who vividly recalls what it was to be a child, amuses adults with similar memories.In the summer of 1876, while staying with his in-laws Susan and Theodore Crane on Quarry Farm overlooking Elmira, Clemens began writing what he called in a letter to his friend William Dean Howells Huck Finns Autobiography. Huck had appeared as a character in Tom Sawyer, and Clemens decided that the untutored boy had his own story to tell. He soon discovered that it had to be told in Hucks own vernacular voice. Huckleberry Finn was written in fits and starts over an extended period and would not be published until 1885.Twin subsequently visited Europe for nearly two years. He published A Tramp Abroad 1880, about his travels with his friend Joseph Twichell in the Black Forest and the Swiss Alps, and The Prince and the Pauper 1881, a fanciful tale set in 16th-century England and written for young people of all ages. In 1882 he traveled up the Mississippi with Horace Bixby, taking notes for the book that became Life on the Mississippi 1883. All the while, he continued to make often ill-advised investments. In 1884 Clemens began the first of several Tom-and-Huck sequels. None of them would rival Huckleberry Finn.All the Tom-and-Huck narratives engage in broad comedy and pointed satire, and they show that Twain had not lost his ability to speak in Hucks voice. What distinguishes Huckleberry Finn from the others is the moral dilemma Huck faces in aiding the runaway slave Jim while at the same time escaping from the unwanted influences of so-called civilization.Through Huck, the novels narrator, Twain was able to address the shameful legacy of chattel slavery prior to the Civil War and the persistent racial discrimination and violence after. That he did so in the voice and consciousness of a 14-year-old boy, a character who shows the signs of having been trained to accept the cruel and indifferent attitudes of a slaveholding culture, gives the novel its affecting power, which can elicit genuine sympathies in readers but can also generate controversy and debate and can affront those who find the book patronizing toward African Americans, if not perhaps much worse. If Huckleberry Finn is a great book of American literature, its greatness may lie in its continuing ability to touch a nerve in the American national consciousness that is still raw and troubling.For a time, Clemenss prospects seemed rosy. After working closely with Ulysses S. Grant, he watched as his companys publication of the former U.S. presidents memoirs in 188586 became an overwhelming success. He began to write A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court, about the exploits of a practical and democratic factory superintendent who is magically transported to Camelot and attempts to transform the kingdom according to 19th-century republican values and modern technology. Clemens predicted this novel would be his swan-song to literature and that he would live comfortably off the profits of his investment.Things did not go according to plan, however. His publishing company was floundering and he suffered from rheumatism in his right arm, but continued to write for magazines out of necessity. Still, he was getting deeper and deeper in debt, and by 1891 he closed his beloved house in Hartford, and the family moved to Europe, where they might live more cheaply and, perhaps, where his wife, who had always been frail, might improve her health. Debts continued to mount, and the financial panic of 1893 made it difficult to borrow money. In 1894, approaching his 60th year, Samuel Clemens was forced to repair his fortunes and to remake his career.Late in 1894 The Tragedy of Puddnhead Wilson and the Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins was published. Set in the antebellum South, Puddnhead Wilson concerns the fates of transposed babies, one white and the other black, and is a fascinating, if ambiguous, exploration of the social and legal construction of race. It also reflects Twains thoughts on determinism, a subject that would increasingly occupy his thoughts for the remainder of his life.Clemens published his next novel, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc serialized 189596, anonymously in hopes that the public might take it more seriously than a book bearing the Mark Twain name. The strategy did not work, for it soon became generally known that he was the author. Clemenss embarked on a lecture tour in July 1895 that would take him across North America to Vancouver, B.C., Can., and from there around the world. He gave lectures in Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, and points in-between, arriving in England a little more than a year afterward.Clemens was in London when he was notified of the death of his daughter Susy, of spinal meningitis. A pall settled over the Clemens household they would not celebrate birthdays or holidays for the next several years. As an antidote to his grief as much as anything else, Clemens threw himself into work.Clemens had acquired the esteem and moral authority he had yearned for only a few years before, and the writer made good use of his reinvigorated position. He began writing The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg 1899, a devastating satire of venality in small-town America, and the first of three manuscript versions of The Mysterious Stranger.Some of Twains best work during his late years was not fiction but polemical essays in which his earnestness was not in doubt an essay against anti-Semitism, Concerning the Jews 1899 a denunciation of imperialism, To the Man Sitting in Darkness 1901 an essay on lynching, The United States of Lyncherdom posthumously published in 1923 and a pamphlet on the brutal and exploitative Belgian rule in the Congo under Leopold II, King Leopolds Soliloquy1905.Clemenss last years have been described as his bad mood period. What seemed to be new was the frequent absence of the palliative humor that had seasoned his earlier works. Though the worst of his financial worries were behind him, Clemens and his family suffered from one sort of ailment or another for many years. In 1896 his daughter Jean was diagnosed with epilepsy. By 1901 his wifes health was seriously deteriorating. She was violently ill in 1902, and died on June 5, 1904. Something of his affection for her and his sense of personal loss after her death is conveyed in the moving piece Eves Diary 1906. The story chronicles in tenderly comic ways the loving relationship between Adam and Eve. After Eve dies, Adam comments at her grave site, Wheresoever she was, there was Eden. His daughter Jean died on December 24, 1909. The Death of Jean 1911 was written beside her deathbed. He was writing, he said, to keep my heart from breaking.Twain was speaking candidly in his last years but still with a vitality and ironic detachment that kept his work from being merely the fulminations of an old and angry man. He traveled to Bermuda in January 1910 by early April he was having severe chest pains and returned to his home Stormfield where he died on April 21. The last piece of writing he did, evidently, was the short humorous sketch Etiquette for the Afterlife Advice to Paine first published in full in 1995. Clemens was buried in the family plot in Elmira, New York, alongside his wife, his son, and two of his daughters.The above biography is an abstract of a significantly longer article by Thomas V. Quirk on Britannica.com. _____________________________________________Quotes and Literary Excerpts by Mark TwainIf you tell the truth, you dont have to remember anything. Mark Twain_____________________________________________Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform or pause and reflect. Mark Twain_____________________________________________Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well. Mark Twain____________________________________________I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. Mark Twain_____________________________________________The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. Mark Twain_____________________________________________Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. Mark Twain_____________________________________________Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 2._____________________________________________He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 2._____________________________________________The minister gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod and yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone and thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly worth the saving.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 5._____________________________________________To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 22._____________________________________________She makes me get up just at the same time every morning she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder she wont let me sleep in the woodshed I got to wear them blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom they dont seem to let any air git through em, somehow and theyre so rotten nice that I cant set down, nor lay down, nor roll around anywhers I haint slid on a cellar-door for well, it pears to be years I got to go to church and sweat and sweat I hate them ornery sermons! I cant ketch a fly in there, I cant chaw. I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The widder eats by a bell she goes to bed by a bell she gits up by a bell everythings so awful reglar a body cant stand it.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 35.___________________________________________Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Notice__________________________________________You dont know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer but that aint no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ch. 1._________________________________________Jim was most ruined for a servant, because he got stuck up on account of having seen the devil and been rode by witches.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ch. 2._______________________________________________We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didnt ever feel like talking loud, and it warnt often that we laughed, only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, nor the next.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ch. 12.______________________________________________There warnt anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warnt any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because its cool. If you notice, most folks dont go to church only when theyve got to but a hog is different.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ch. 18.______________________________________________We said there warnt no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft dont. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ch. 18.____________________________________________So there aint nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if Id a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldnt a tackled it and aintt agoing to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally shes going to adopt me and sivilize me and I cant stand it. I been there before.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ch. 43.____________________________________________Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all ones lifetime. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad Roughing It____________________________________________After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her. Mark Twain, Diaries of Adam Eve___________________________________________Nothing that grieves us can be called little by the eternal laws of proportion a childs loss of a doll and a kings loss of a crown are events of the same size.--Mark Twain, Which was the Dream? 1898. Unfinished manuscript begun in 1898. First published in Mark Twains Which Was the Dream? and Other Symbolic Writings of the Later Years, ed. John S Tuckey, 1967 Its December 1st and the march towards the holidays begins as we belatedly note the birth date of Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, November 30, 1835, Florida, MissouriApril 21, 1910, Redding, Connecticut, American humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who acquired international fame for his travel narratives, especially The Innocents Abroad 1869, Roughing It 1872, and Life on the Mississippi 1883, and for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 1876 and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1885.Samuel Clemens, the sixth child of John Marshall and Jane Lampton Clemens, was born two months prematurely and was in relatively poor health for the first 10 years of his life. His mother tried various allopathic and hydropathic remedies on him during those early years, and his recollections of those instances along with other memories of his growing up would eventually find their way into Tom Sawyer and other writings.Clemens father, John Clemens, by all reports was a serious man who seldom demonstrated affection. No doubt his temperament was affected by his worries over his financial situation, made all the more distressing by a series of business failures. It was the diminishing fortunes of the Clemens family that led them in 1839 to move 30 miles east from Florida, Missouri, to the Mississippi River port town of Hannibal, where there were greater opportunities.Perhaps it was the romantic visionary in him that caused Clemens to recall his youth in Hannibal with such fondness. As he remembered it in Old Times on the Mississippi 1875, the village was a white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summers morning, until the arrival of a riverboat suddenly made it a hive of activity. The gamblers, stevedores, and pilots, the boisterous raftsmen and elegant travelers, all bound for somewhere surely glamorous and exciting, would have impressed a young boy and stimulated his already active imagination.Clemens and his friends played at being pirates, Robin Hood, and other fabled adventurers. Among those companions was Tom Blankenship, an affable but impoverished boy whom Twain later identified as the model for the character Huckleberry Finn. There were local diversions as wellfishing, picnicking, and swimming. A boy might swim or canoe to and explore Glasscocks Island, in the middle of the Mississippi River, or he might visit the labyrinthine McDowells Cave, about 2 miles south of town. The first site evidently became Jacksons Island in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the second became McDougals Cave in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In the summers, Clemens visited his uncle John Quarless farm, near Florida, Missouri, where he played with his cousins and listened to stories told by the slave Uncle Daniel, who served, in part, as a model for Jim in Huckleberry Finn.In many ways the childhood of Samuel Clemens was a rough one. Death from disease during this time was common. His sister Margaret died of a fever when Clemens was four years old three years later his brother Benjamin died. When he was eight, a measles epidemic potentially lethal in those days was so frightening to him that he deliberately exposed himself to infection by climbing into bed with his friend Will Bowen in order to relieve the anxiety. A cholera epidemic a few years later killed at least 24 people, a substantial number for a small town.In 1847 Clemenss father died of pneumonia. John Clemenss death contributed further to the familys financial instability. Even before that year, however, continuing debts had forced them to auction off property, to sell their only slave, Jennie, to take in boarders, and to sell their furniture.After the death of his father, Sam Clemens worked at several odd jobs in town, and in 1848 he became a printers apprentice for Joseph P. Aments Missouri Courier.Having acquired a trade by age 17, Clemens left Hannibal in 1853 with some degree of self-sufficiency. He worked briefly as a typesetter in St. Louis in 1853 before traveling to New York City to work at a large printing shop. From there he went to Philadelphia and on to Washington, D.C. then he returned to New York. In 1857, he persuaded the accomplished riverboat captain Horace Bixby to take him on as a riverboat apprentice. Having agreed to pay a 500 apprentice fee, Clemens studied the Mississippi River and the operation of a riverboat under the masterful instruction of Bixby, and ultimately became an experienced riverboat pilot.The Civil War severely curtailed river traffic, and, fearing that he might be impressed as a Union gunboat pilot, Clemens brought his years on the river to a halt a mere two years after he had acquired his license and returned to Hannibal. Clemens brother, Orion Clemens, was deeply involved in Republican Party politics and in Abraham Lincolns campaign for the U.S. presidency, and it was as a reward for those efforts that he was appointed territorial secretary of Nevada. Upon their arrival in Carson City, the territorial capital, Sam Clemenss association with Orion did not provide him the sort of livelihood he might have supposed, and, once again, he had to shift for himselfmining and investing in timber and silver and gold stocks.The Nevada Territory was a rambunctious and violent place during the boom years of the Comstock Lode, from its discovery in 1859 to its peak production in the late 1870s. Nevertheless, Clemens seems to have retained something of his moral integrity. He was often indignant and prone to expose fraud and corruption when he found them. In February 1863 Clemens covered the legislative session in Carson City and wrote three letters for the Enterprise. He signed them Mark Twain. It would be several years before this pen name would acquire the firmness of a full-fledged literary persona, however. In the meantime, he was discovering by degrees what it meant to be a literary person.Already he was acquiring a reputation outside the territory. Some of his articles and sketches had appeared in New York papers, and he became the Nevada correspondent for the San Francisco Morning Call. Clemens went to the Tuolumne foothills to do some mining. It was there that he heard the story of a jumping frog. The story was widely known, but it was new to Clemens, and he took notes for a literary representation of the tale. When he was invited to contribute something for a book of humorous sketches, Clemens decided to write up the story which was published in the New York Saturday Press in November 1865 and was subsequently reprinted throughout the country. Mark Twain had acquired sudden celebrity.Clemens continued to write for newspapers, traveling to Hawaii for the Sacramento Union and also writing for New York newspapers, but he apparently wanted to become something more than a journalist. He went on his first lecture tour, speaking mostly on the Sandwich Islands Hawaii in 1866. It was a success, and for the rest of his life, though he found touring grueling, he knew he could take to the lecture platform when he needed money. In 1867, he moved to New York City, serving as the traveling correspondent for the San Francisco Alta California and for New York newspapers. He embarked on a transatlantic excursion to Europe and the Holy Land eventually his account of the voyage was published as The Innocents Abroad 1869 which was a great success.Clemenss courtship of Olivia Langdon, the daughter of a prosperous businessman from Elmira, New York, was an ardent one, conducted mostly through correspondence. They were married in February 1870. He worked hard on a book about his experiences in the West. Roughing It was published in February 1872 and sold well. Clemens subsequently began work with his friend Charles Dudley Warner on a satirical novel about political and financial corruption in the United States. The Gilded Age 1873 was well received, and a play based on the most amusing character from the novel, Colonel Sellers, also became quite popular.The Gilded Age was Twains first attempt at a novel, and he soon began writing Tom Sawyer, along with his reminiscences about his days as a riverboat pilot. The Clemens family moved into their still-unfinished house in Nook Farm in Hartford, Connecticut later the same year, counting among their neighbours writer Harriet Beecher Stowe.Old Times on the Mississippi appeared in the Atlantic in installments in 1875. Old Times, which would later become a portion of Life on the Mississippi, described comically, but a bit ruefully, a way of life that would never return. The highly episodic narrative of Tom Sawyer, which recounts the mischievous adventures of a boy growing up along the Mississippi River, was colored by a nostalgia for childhood and simplicity that would permit Twain to characterize the novel as a hymn to childhood.The continuing popularity of Tom Sawyer it sold well from its first publication, in 1876, and has never gone out of print indicates that Twain could write a novel that appealed to young and old readers alike. The antics and high adventure of Tom Sawyer and his comradesincluding pranks in church and at school, the comic courtship of Becky Thatcher, a murder mystery, and a thrilling escape from a cavecontinue to delight children, while the books comedy, narrated by someone who vividly recalls what it was to be a child, amuses adults with similar memories.In the summer of 1876, while staying with his in-laws Susan and Theodore Crane on Quarry Farm overlooking Elmira, Clemens began writing what he called in a letter to his friend William Dean Howells Huck Finns Autobiography. Huck had appeared as a character in Tom Sawyer, and Clemens decided that the untutored boy had his own story to tell. He soon discovered that it had to be told in Hucks own vernacular voice. Huckleberry Finn was written in fits and starts over an extended period and would not be published until 1885.Twin subsequently visited Europe for nearly two years. He published A Tramp Abroad 1880, about his travels with his friend Joseph Twichell in the Black Forest and the Swiss Alps, and The Prince and the Pauper 1881, a fanciful tale set in 16th-century England and written for young people of all ages. In 1882 he traveled up the Mississippi with Horace Bixby, taking notes for the book that became Life on the Mississippi 1883. All the while, he continued to make often ill-advised investments. In 1884 Clemens began the first of several Tom-and-Huck sequels. None of them would rival Huckleberry Finn.All the Tom-and-Huck narratives engage in broad comedy and pointed satire, and they show that Twain had not lost his ability to speak in Hucks voice. What distinguishes Huckleberry Finn from the others is the moral dilemma Huck faces in aiding the runaway slave Jim while at the same time escaping from the unwanted influences of so-called civilization.Through Huck, the novels narrator, Twain was able to address the shameful legacy of chattel slavery prior to the Civil War and the persistent racial discrimination and violence after. That he did so in the voice and consciousness of a 14-year-old boy, a character who shows the signs of having been trained to accept the cruel and indifferent attitudes of a slaveholding culture, gives the novel its affecting power, which can elicit genuine sympathies in readers but can also generate controversy and debate and can affront those who find the book patronizing toward African Americans, if not perhaps much worse. If Huckleberry Finn is a great book of American literature, its greatness may lie in its continuing ability to touch a nerve in the American national consciousness that is still raw and troubling.For a time, Clemenss prospects seemed rosy. After working closely with Ulysses S. Grant, he watched as his companys publication of the former U.S. presidents memoirs in 188586 became an overwhelming success. He began to write A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court, about the exploits of a practical and democratic factory superintendent who is magically transported to Camelot and attempts to transform the kingdom according to 19th-century republican values and modern technology. Clemens predicted this novel would be his swan-song to literature and that he would live comfortably off the profits of his investment.Things did not go according to plan, however. His publishing company was floundering and he suffered from rheumatism in his right arm, but continued to write for magazines out of necessity. Still, he was getting deeper and deeper in debt, and by 1891 he closed his beloved house in Hartford, and the family moved to Europe, where they might live more cheaply and, perhaps, where his wife, who had always been frail, might improve her health. Debts continued to mount, and the financial panic of 1893 made it difficult to borrow money. In 1894, approaching his 60th year, Samuel Clemens was forced to repair his fortunes and to remake his career.Late in 1894 The Tragedy of Puddnhead Wilson and the Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins was published. Set in the antebellum South, Puddnhead Wilson concerns the fates of transposed babies, one white and the other black, and is a fascinating, if ambiguous, exploration of the social and legal construction of race. It also reflects Twains thoughts on determinism, a subject that would increasingly occupy his thoughts for the remainder of his life.Clemens published his next novel, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc serialized 189596, anonymously in hopes that the public might take it more seriously than a book bearing the Mark Twain name. The strategy did not work, for it soon became generally known that he was the author. Clemenss embarked on a lecture tour in July 1895 that would take him across North America to Vancouver, B.C., Can., and from there around the world. He gave lectures in Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, and points in-between, arriving in England a little more than a year afterward.Clemens was in London when he was notified of the death of his daughter Susy, of spinal meningitis. A pall settled over the Clemens household they would not celebrate birthdays or holidays for the next several years. As an antidote to his grief as much as anything else, Clemens threw himself into work.Clemens had acquired the esteem and moral authority he had yearned for only a few years before, and the writer made good use of his reinvigorated position. He began writing The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg 1899, a devastating satire of venality in small-town America, and the first of three manuscript versions of The Mysterious Stranger.Some of Twains best work during his late years was not fiction but polemical essays in which his earnestness was not in doubt an essay against anti-Semitism, Concerning the Jews 1899 a denunciation of imperialism, To the Man Sitting in Darkness 1901 an essay on lynching, The United States of Lyncherdom posthumously published in 1923 and a pamphlet on the brutal and exploitative Belgian rule in the Congo under Leopold II, King Leopolds Soliloquy1905.Clemenss last years have been described as his bad mood period. What seemed to be new was the frequent absence of the palliative humor that had seasoned his earlier works. Though the worst of his financial worries were behind him, Clemens and his family suffered from one sort of ailment or another for many years. In 1896 his daughter Jean was diagnosed with epilepsy. By 1901 his wifes health was seriously deteriorating. She was violently ill in 1902, and died on June 5, 1904. Something of his affection for her and his sense of personal loss after her death is conveyed in the moving piece Eves Diary 1906. The story chronicles in tenderly comic ways the loving relationship between Adam and Eve. After Eve dies, Adam comments at her grave site, Wheresoever she was, there was Eden. His daughter Jean died on December 24, 1909. The Death of Jean 1911 was written beside her deathbed. He was writing, he said, to keep my heart from breaking.Twain was speaking candidly in his last years but still with a vitality and ironic detachment that kept his work from being merely the fulminations of an old and angry man. He traveled to Bermuda in January 1910 by early April he was having severe chest pains and returned to his home Stormfield where he died on April 21. The last piece of writing he did, evidently, was the short humorous sketch Etiquette for the Afterlife Advice to Paine first published in full in 1995. Clemens was buried in the family plot in Elmira, New York, alongside his wife, his son, and two of his daughters.The above biography is an abstract of a significantly longer article by Thomas V. Quirk on Britannica.com. _____________________________________________Quotes and Literary Excerpts by Mark TwainIf you tell the truth, you dont have to remember anything. Mark Twain_____________________________________________Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform or pause and reflect. Mark Twain_____________________________________________Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well. Mark Twain____________________________________________I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. Mark Twain_____________________________________________The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. Mark Twain_____________________________________________Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. Mark Twain_____________________________________________Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 2._____________________________________________He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 2._____________________________________________The minister gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod and yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone and thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly worth the saving.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 5._____________________________________________To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 22._____________________________________________She makes me get up just at the same time every morning she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder she wont let me sleep in the woodshed I got to wear them blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom they dont seem to let any air git through em, somehow and theyre so rotten nice that I cant set down, nor lay down, nor roll around anywhers I haint slid on a cellar-door for well, it pears to be years I got to go to church and sweat and sweat I hate them ornery sermons! I cant ketch a fly in there, I cant chaw. I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The widder eats by a bell she goes to bed by a bell she gits up by a bell everythings so awful reglar a body cant stand it.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 35.___________________________________________Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Notice__________________________________________You dont know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer but that aint no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ch. 1._________________________________________Jim was most ruined for a servant, because he got stuck up on account of having seen the devil and been rode by witches.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ch. 2._______________________________________________We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didnt ever feel like talking loud, and it warnt often that we laughed, only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, nor the next.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ch. 12.______________________________________________There warnt anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warnt any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because its cool. If you notice, most folks dont go to church only when theyve got to but a hog is different.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ch. 18.______________________________________________We said there warnt no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft dont. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ch. 18.____________________________________________So there aint nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if Id a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldnt a tackled it and aintt agoing to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally shes going to adopt me and sivilize me and I cant stand it. I been there before.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ch. 43.____________________________________________Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all ones lifetime. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad Roughing It____________________________________________After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her. Mark Twain, Diaries of Adam Eve___________________________________________Nothing that grieves us can be called little by the eternal laws of proportion a childs loss of a doll and a kings loss of a crown are events of the same size.--Mark Twain, Which was the Dream? 1898. Unfinished manuscript begun in 1898. First published in Mark Twains Which Was the Dream? and Other Symbolic Writings of the Later Years, ed. John S Tuckey, 1967 Its December 1st and the march towards the holidays begins as we belatedly note the birth date of Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, November 30, 1835, Florida, MissouriApril 21, 1910, Redding, Connecticut, American humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who acquired international fame for his travel narratives, especially The Innocents Abroad 1869, Roughing It 1872, and Life on the Mississippi 1883, and for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 1876 and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1885.Samuel Clemens, the sixth child of John Marshall and Jane Lampton Clemens, was born two months prematurely and was in relatively poor health for the first 10 years of his life. His mother tried various allopathic and hydropathic remedies on him during those early years, and his recollections of those instances along with other memories of his growing up would eventually find their way into Tom Sawyer and other writings.Clemens father, John Clemens, by all reports was a serious man who seldom demonstrated affection. No doubt his temperament was affected by his worries over his financial situation, made all the more distressing by a series of business failures. It was the diminishing fortunes of the Clemens family that led them in 1839 to move 30 miles east from Florida, Missouri, to the Mississippi River port town of Hannibal, where there were greater opportunities.Perhaps it was the romantic visionary in him that caused Clemens to recall his youth in Hannibal with such fondness. As he remembered it in Old Times on the Mississippi 1875, the village was a white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summers morning, until the arrival of a riverboat suddenly made it a hive of activity. The gamblers, stevedores, and pilots, the boisterous raftsmen and elegant travelers, all bound for somewhere surely glamorous and exciting, would have impressed a young boy and stimulated his already active imagination.Clemens and his friends played at being pirates, Robin Hood, and other fabled adventurers. Among those companions was Tom Blankenship, an affable but impoverished boy whom Twain later identified as the model for the character Huckleberry Finn. There were local diversions as wellfishing, picnicking, and swimming. A boy might swim or canoe to and explore Glasscocks Island, in the middle of the Mississippi River, or he might visit the labyrinthine McDowells Cave, about 2 miles south of town. The first site evidently became Jacksons Island in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the second became McDougals Cave in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In the summers, Clemens visited his uncle John Quarless farm, near Florida, Missouri, where he played with his cousins and listened to stories told by the slave Uncle Daniel, who served, in part, as a model for Jim in Huckleberry Finn.In many ways the childhood of Samuel Clemens was a rough one. Death from disease during this time was common. His sister Margaret died of a fever when Clemens was four years old three years later his brother Benjamin died. When he was eight, a measles epidemic potentially lethal in those days was so frightening to him that he deliberately exposed himself to infection by climbing into bed with his friend Will Bowen in order to relieve the anxiety. A cholera epidemic a few years later killed at least 24 people, a substantial number for a small town.In 1847 Clemenss father died of pneumonia. John Clemenss death contributed further to the familys financial instability. Even before that year, however, continuing debts had forced them to auction off property, to sell their only slave, Jennie, to take in boarders, and to sell their furniture.After the death of his father, Sam Clemens worked at several odd jobs in town, and in 1848 he became a printers apprentice for Joseph P. Aments Missouri Courier.Having acquired a trade by age 17, Clemens left Hannibal in 1853 with some degree of self-sufficiency. He worked briefly as a typesetter in St. Louis in 1853 before traveling to New York City to work at a large printing shop. From there he went to Philadelphia and on to Washington, D.C. then he returned to New York. In 1857, he persuaded the accomplished riverboat captain Horace Bixby to take him on as a riverboat apprentice. Having agreed to pay a 500 apprentice fee, Clemens studied the Mississippi River and the operation of a riverboat under the masterful instruction of Bixby, and ultimately became an experienced riverboat pilot.The Civil War severely curtailed river traffic, and, fearing that he might be impressed as a Union gunboat pilot, Clemens brought his years on the river to a halt a mere two years after he had acquired his license and returned to Hannibal. Clemens brother, Orion Clemens, was deeply involved in Republican Party politics and in Abraham Lincolns campaign for the U.S. presidency, and it was as a reward for those efforts that he was appointed territorial secretary of Nevada. Upon their arrival in Carson City, the territorial capital, Sam Clemenss association with Orion did not provide him the sort of livelihood he might have supposed, and, once again, he had to shift for himselfmining and investing in timber and silver and gold stocks.The Nevada Territory was a rambunctious and violent place during the boom years of the Comstock Lode, from its discovery in 1859 to its peak production in the late 1870s. Nevertheless, Clemens seems to have retained something of his moral integrity. He was often indignant and prone to expose fraud and corruption when he found them. In February 1863 Clemens covered the legislative session in Carson City and wrote three letters for the Enterprise. He signed them Mark Twain. It would be several years before this pen name would acquire the firmness of a full-fledged literary persona, however. In the meantime, he was discovering by degrees what it meant to be a literary person.Already he was acquiring a reputation outside the territory. Some of his articles and sketches had appeared in New York papers, and he became the Nevada correspondent for the San Francisco Morning Call. Clemens went to the Tuolumne foothills to do some mining. It was there that he heard the story of a jumping frog. The story was widely known, but it was new to Clemens, and he took notes for a literary representation of the tale. When he was invited to contribute something for a book of humorous sketches, Clemens decided to write up the story which was published in the New York Saturday Press in November 1865 and was subsequently reprinted throughout the country. Mark Twain had acquired sudden celebrity.Clemens continued to write for newspapers, traveling to Hawaii for the Sacramento Union and also writing for New York newspapers, but he apparently wanted to become something more than a journalist. He went on his first lecture tour, speaking mostly on the Sandwich Islands Hawaii in 1866. It was a success, and for the rest of his life, though he found touring grueling, he knew he could take to the lecture platform when he needed money. In 1867, he moved to New York City, serving as the traveling correspondent for the San Francisco Alta California and for New York newspapers. He embarked on a transatlantic excursion to Europe and the Holy Land eventually his account of the voyage was published as The Innocents Abroad 1869 which was a great success.Clemenss courtship of Olivia Langdon, the daughter of a prosperous businessman from Elmira, New York, was an ardent one, conducted mostly through correspondence. They were married in February 1870. He worked hard on a book about his experiences in the West. Roughing It was published in February 1872 and sold well. Clemens subsequently began work with his friend Charles Dudley Warner on a satirical novel about political and financial corruption in the United States. The Gilded Age 1873 was well received, and a play based on the most amusing character from the novel, Colonel Sellers, also became quite popular.The Gilded Age was Twains first attempt at a novel, and he soon began writing Tom Sawyer, along with his reminiscences about his days as a riverboat pilot. The Clemens family moved into their still-unfinished house in Nook Farm in Hartford, Connecticut later the same year, counting among their neighbours writer Harriet Beecher Stowe.Old Times on the Mississippi appeared in the Atlantic in installments in 1875. Old Times, which would later become a portion of Life on the Mississippi, described comically, but a bit ruefully, a way of life that would never return. The highly episodic narrative of Tom Sawyer, which recounts the mischievous adventures of a boy growing up along the Mississippi River, was colored by a nostalgia for childhood and simplicity that would permit Twain to characterize the novel as a hymn to childhood.The continuing popularity of Tom Sawyer it sold well from its first publication, in 1876, and has never gone out of print indicates that Twain could write a novel that appealed to young and old readers alike. The antics and high adventure of Tom Sawyer and his comradesincluding pranks in church and at school, the comic courtship of Becky Thatcher, a murder mystery, and a thrilling escape from a cavecontinue to delight children, while the books comedy, narrated by someone who vividly recalls what it was to be a child, amuses adults with similar memories.In the summer of 1876, while staying with his in-laws Susan and Theodore Crane on Quarry Farm overlooking Elmira, Clemens began writing what he called in a letter to his friend William Dean Howells Huck Finns Autobiography. Huck had appeared as a character in Tom Sawyer, and Clemens decided that the untutored boy had his own story to tell. He soon discovered that it had to be told in Hucks own vernacular voice. Huckleberry Finn was written in fits and starts over an extended period and would not be published until 1885.Twin subsequently visited Europe for nearly two years. He published A Tramp Abroad 1880, about his travels with his friend Joseph Twichell in the Black Forest and the Swiss Alps, and The Prince and the Pauper 1881, a fanciful tale set in 16th-century England and written for young people of all ages. In 1882 he traveled up the Mississippi with Horace Bixby, taking notes for the book that became Life on the Mississippi 1883. All the while, he continued to make often ill-advised investments. In 1884 Clemens began the first of several Tom-and-Huck sequels. None of them would rival Huckleberry Finn.All the Tom-and-Huck narratives engage in broad comedy and pointed satire, and they show that Twain had not lost his ability to speak in Hucks voice. What distinguishes Huckleberry Finn from the others is the moral dilemma Huck faces in aiding the runaway slave Jim while at the same time escaping from the unwanted influences of so-called civilization.Through Huck, the novels narrator, Twain was able to address the shameful legacy of chattel slavery prior to the Civil War and the persistent racial discrimination and violence after. That he did so in the voice and consciousness of a 14-year-old boy, a character who shows the signs of having been trained to accept the cruel and indifferent attitudes of a slaveholding culture, gives the novel its affecting power, which can elicit genuine sympathies in readers but can also generate controversy and debate and can affront those who find the book patronizing toward African Americans, if not perhaps much worse. If Huckleberry Finn is a great book of American literature, its greatness may lie in its continuing ability to touch a nerve in the American national consciousness that is still raw and troubling.For a time, Clemenss prospects seemed rosy. After working closely with Ulysses S. Grant, he watched as his companys publication of the former U.S. presidents memoirs in 188586 became an overwhelming success. He began to write A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court, about the exploits of a practical and democratic factory superintendent who is magically transported to Camelot and attempts to transform the kingdom according to 19th-century republican values and modern technology. Clemens predicted this novel would be his swan-song to literature and that he would live comfortably off the profits of his investment.Things did not go according to plan, however. His publishing company was floundering and he suffered from rheumatism in his right arm, but continued to write for magazines out of necessity. Still, he was getting deeper and deeper in debt, and by 1891 he closed his beloved house in Hartford, and the family moved to Europe, where they might live more cheaply and, perhaps, where his wife, who had always been frail, might improve her health. Debts continued to mount, and the financial panic of 1893 made it difficult to borrow money. In 1894, approaching his 60th year, Samuel Clemens was forced to repair his fortunes and to remake his career.Late in 1894 The Tragedy of Puddnhead Wilson and the Comedy of Those Extraordinary Twins was published. Set in the antebellum South, Puddnhead Wilson concerns the fates of transposed babies, one white and the other black, and is a fascinating, if ambiguous, exploration of the social and legal construction of race. It also reflects Twains thoughts on determinism, a subject that would increasingly occupy his thoughts for the remainder of his life.Clemens published his next novel, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc serialized 189596, anonymously in hopes that the public might take it more seriously than a book bearing the Mark Twain name. The strategy did not work, for it soon became generally known that he was the author. Clemenss embarked on a lecture tour in July 1895 that would take him across North America to Vancouver, B.C., Can., and from there around the world. He gave lectures in Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa, and points in-between, arriving in England a little more than a year afterward.Clemens was in London when he was notified of the death of his daughter Susy, of spinal meningitis. A pall settled over the Clemens household they would not celebrate birthdays or holidays for the next several years. As an antidote to his grief as much as anything else, Clemens threw himself into work.Clemens had acquired the esteem and moral authority he had yearned for only a few years before, and the writer made good use of his reinvigorated position. He began writing The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg 1899, a devastating satire of venality in small-town America, and the first of three manuscript versions of The Mysterious Stranger.Some of Twains best work during his late years was not fiction but polemical essays in which his earnestness was not in doubt an essay against anti-Semitism, Concerning the Jews 1899 a denunciation of imperialism, To the Man Sitting in Darkness 1901 an essay on lynching, The United States of Lyncherdom posthumously published in 1923 and a pamphlet on the brutal and exploitative Belgian rule in the Congo under Leopold II, King Leopolds Soliloquy1905.Clemenss last years have been described as his bad mood period. What seemed to be new was the frequent absence of the palliative humor that had seasoned his earlier works. Though the worst of his financial worries were behind him, Clemens and his family suffered from one sort of ailment or another for many years. In 1896 his daughter Jean was diagnosed with epilepsy. By 1901 his wifes health was seriously deteriorating. She was violently ill in 1902, and died on June 5, 1904. Something of his affection for her and his sense of personal loss after her death is conveyed in the moving piece Eves Diary 1906. The story chronicles in tenderly comic ways the loving relationship between Adam and Eve. After Eve dies, Adam comments at her grave site, Wheresoever she was, there was Eden. His daughter Jean died on December 24, 1909. The Death of Jean 1911 was written beside her deathbed. He was writing, he said, to keep my heart from breaking.Twain was speaking candidly in his last years but still with a vitality and ironic detachment that kept his work from being merely the fulminations of an old and angry man. He traveled to Bermuda in January 1910 by early April he was having severe chest pains and returned to his home Stormfield where he died on April 21. The last piece of writing he did, evidently, was the short humorous sketch Etiquette for the Afterlife Advice to Paine first published in full in 1995. Clemens was buried in the family plot in Elmira, New York, alongside his wife, his son, and two of his daughters.The above biography is an abstract of a significantly longer article by Thomas V. Quirk on Britannica.com. _____________________________________________Quotes and Literary Excerpts by Mark TwainIf you tell the truth, you dont have to remember anything. Mark Twain_____________________________________________Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform or pause and reflect. Mark Twain_____________________________________________Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well. Mark Twain____________________________________________I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. Mark Twain_____________________________________________The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. Mark Twain_____________________________________________Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. Mark Twain_____________________________________________Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 2._____________________________________________He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 2._____________________________________________The minister gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod and yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone and thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly worth the saving.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 5._____________________________________________To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 22._____________________________________________She makes me get up just at the same time every morning she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder she wont let me sleep in the woodshed I got to wear them bl

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