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Mark Twain
A Literary Life
Everett Emerson
Mark Twain
A Literary Life
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia
Mark Twain’s previously unpublished words are © 1999 by Richard A. Watson and Chase Manhattan Bank as Trustees of the Mark Twain Foundation, which reserves all reproduction or dramatization rights in every medium. Quotation is made with the permission of the University of California Press and Robert H. Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project.
Copyright © 2000 Everett Emerson
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Emerson, Everett H., 1925–
Mark Twain : a literary life / Everett Emerson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8122-3516-9 (alk. paper)
1. Twain, Mark, 1835-1910. 2. Humorists, American—19th century Biography. 3. Authors, American—19th century Biography. 4. Journalists—United States
Biography. I. Title.
PS1331.E48 1999
818′ .409—dc21
[B]
99-34173
CIP
Frontispiece: Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain in 1906, etching by Otto Schneider, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. NPG 69–67.
FOR MY SCHOLARLY FRIENDS
Louis Budd and Alan Gribben
Contents
4 Fumbling, Success, Uncertainty
5 Contracts, Inspirations, Obligations
11 The Humorist as Philosopher
Afterword: Whys and Wherefores
Illustrations
Preface
Mark Twain endures. Readers sense his humanity, enjoy his humor, and appreciate his insights into human nature, even into such painful experiences as embarrassment and humiliation. No matter how remarkable the life of Samuel Clemens was, what matters most is the relationship of Mark Twain the writer and his writings. That is the subject of this book. While I have made use of the materials in my earlier book, The Authentic Mark Twain, which appeared in 1984, the differences between the two books are nevertheless substantial. My increased understanding and knowledge of Mark Twain’s life have led me to realize that in order to see his writings in focus one must give proper attention to aspects of his life that I had either insufficiently recognized or quite neglected in the earlier volume.
The assumption behind this book is that one can understand virtually all of Mark Twain’s works better if one can read them in their biographical context. It is therefore distinctly different from other biographies, including Andrew Hoffman’s Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel L. Clemens (1997), in which much that Mark Twain wrote is ignored.
Samuel Clemens himself, I like to think, would approve of my undertaking. In the next to last year of his life he wrote an essay entitled “The Turning Point of My Life.” In it he asserted, “To me, the most important feature of my life is its literary feature.” My purpose here has been to comprehend that literary feature, which requires a recognition of the constantly changing circumstances of his literary career.
Mark Twain is one of America’s greatest writers. Unlike some of his peers—Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and William Faulkner, for example—he is widely read. Moreover, he and his writings are still frequently in the news: the discovery of the first half of the Huckleberry Finn manuscript in California, new information about Mark Twain’s support of a black student at Yale Law School and a black artist who wanted to study in Paris, the likely extinction of the kind of Calaveras County frog Mark Twain wrote about, the question of whether high school students should be assigned Huckleberry Finn.
Mark Twain’s literary career is truly fascinating in its strangeness. How could this genius have had so little sense of what he should do with himself? A contemporary observer of the writer’s life could not have imagined where his career would subsequently take him and what he would write next, if anything, though the unoriginal idea of writing sequels was always