Investor's Business Daily, August 9th, 2007
Samuel Langhorne Clemens wanted readers to get a hearty dose of reality from his work.
So he did what all good writers do -- write what you know.
Clemens, who achieved worldwide fame using the pen name Mark Twain, based virtually all his writings on personal experience -- mixed with a solid dose of whimsy.
As Geoffrey Ward, Dayton Duncan and Ken Burns wrote in their biography, "Mark Twain," "Clemens' past (was) an inexhaustible source of inspiration for him."
Someone once asked Clemens where he found the material for his books. His response? "When pretending to portray life, I confine myself to life with which I am familiar."
That experience led to such American classics as "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" (based on his youth in a small town) and "Life on the Mississippi" (based on his work as a riverboat pilot).
Clemens (1835-1910) was born two months prematurely in Florida, Mo. He grew up in Hannibal. His father died when Samuel was just 12 years old, making the family's poverty abject. To help out, Clemens quit school two years later, taking a job as a printer at the local newspaper started by his brother, Orion.
Though Orion never paid him the $3.50 weekly salary they'd agreed on, Clemens didn't mope. In his free time, "Sam made the most of his experience," the authors wrote. "He had discovered that he liked to write crude light verse as well as rough-hewn humor 'to make the paper lively.'"
Clemens was a dreamer. It wasn't long before wanderlust gripped him. He traveled around the country, from St. Louis to Philadelphia to Keokuk, Iowa, before returning to the Mississippi to fulfill a dream -- becoming a Mississippi River pilot.
Though pilot was a high-prestige and high-paying job, Clemens was always on the lookout for the next opportunity. He moved to Nevada and tried to become a timber baron and silver miner. But all his land claims proved worthless, leaving him with just his dreams. "We were stark mad with excitement -- drunk with happiness -- smothered under mountains of prospective wealth ... but our credit was not good at the grocer's," Clemens wrote.
So he took a series of jobs, including screening sand for quartz. "I was discharged just at the moment I was going to resign," he wrote. "I could not endure the heavy labor; and on the company's side, they did not feel justified in paying me to shovel sand down my back."
It was then that he went full time into writing as a reporter for papers in the West. In a letter to one of his brothers, he wrote: "I have had a 'call' to literature, of a low order -- i.e., humorous. It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit."
He went to work for the Sacramento Union, which sent him to Hawaii (then the Sandwich Islands). In one of his first dispatches, he wrote: "I observed a bevy of nude young ladies bathing in the sea, and went down and sat on their clothes to keep them from being stolen." His irreverent articles were published throughout California.
When he returned, he was advised to cash in on his renown and become a lecturer. He was at first reluctant to do so. "The prospect of failing before a live audience terrified him," the authors wrote. But he knew excellent advice when he heard it and agreed to give lecturing a shot. After one talk, he received rave reviews in area newspapers.
When he saw how lucrative and how much fun the lecture circuit could be, he seized the moment. He arranged to deliver lectures across northern California and western Nevada -- 16 over one month.
But Clemens wanted to compete among the best. "The West, he believed, was no longer big enough for his talents," the authors wrote.
So Clemens headed east.
It was while in New York City that his first book, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches," was published in 1867. He followed that with "The Innocents Abroad," based on a nearly half-year cruise to Europe and the Holy Land he took as an assignment for several newspapers.
While most of his work was humorous, frequently he added a serious undercurrent. Clemens had the courage to go where few writers of his time cared to. "A True Story, Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It," published in the Atlantic Monthly, was a sympathetic retelling of the trials and tribulations of a former slave separated from her family.
He'd heard it from the family cook "and wrote it down precisely as she told it," the authors of his biography wrote. "He was a master of vernacular storytelling, but black dialect had heretofore been used in American literature almost entirely for crude comic effect. This was something altogether different."
In "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," Clemens again forced readers to confront the issue of racism.
At age 60 he went back on the lecture circuit to pay off creditors. He was in frail health when he returned from the five-continent tour, and a rumor spread that he was dying. It was in response to a reporter's question on this subject that Clemens noted that "the report of my death has been greatly exaggerated."
In 1909, his daughter Jean died, after which he wrote "The Death of Jean," the final chapter of his autobiography. It was the last manuscript he would complete.
He died the following April.
This story originally ran Jan. 15, 2002, on Leaders & Success.
