Samuel Langhorne Clemens Biography

There was always a "twaining" involved with Clemens, a paradoxical duality of dark and light. He was America's favorite humorist, yes, but also the author of such bleak and bitter works as The Mysterious Stranger, Pudd'nhead Wilson, and "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg." A great success in his day with mansions and servants and world travel, Clemens also suffered through the deaths of his wife of forty years and three of his children, the nervous collapse of the fourth, and bankruptcy at an age when most authors are hoping for comfortable retirement. A great innovator, using the vernacular in literature in a manner in which it had never been used before, Clemens gave birth to a peculiarly localized narrative fiction, prompting Ernest Hemingway's much later remark that all American literature derives from Huckleberry Finn. Yet Clemens was as much reviled as praised for this use of spontaneous speech patterns in his books and journalism. Such language was too much for genteel readers of the day, it was thought. And of this day, too, it would seem, for Clemens is still under the microscope in the late twentieth century for his language, though now such criticism is leveled in the name of political correctness.