Mark Twain 1835-1910

Stanza 1: Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, he was raised in Hannibal, Missouri. He was the sixth of seven children, three of whom died in childhood and was, himself, a sickly child until the age of seven, having been born two months prematurely. The conversation with his mother occurred in adulthood. He always knew that he could play on his poorly condition to get away with murder! And it worked! She was a fun-loving, tender-hearted woman with an obvious sense of humour (which he inherited). His father (died when Twain was twelve), however, was surly, unsmiling and preoccupied by the family's straightened circumstances.

Stanza 2: Hannibal, a port on the Mississippi river, was a place of cruelty, drunkenness, poverty and boredom in which Twain witnessed much death and
oppression, including that of an enslaved person struck by his overseer. This soul-crushing backdrop became the inspiration for his fictional town of St Petersburg in his later Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn tales. Hardly surprising, therefore, that the mighty Mississippi offered such dreams of adventure and escape.

Stanza 3: * Old Blue - nickname for the Mississippi.
One very prevalent ambition was to become a steamboatman and "pilot was the grandest position of all." His prestige exceeded that of even the captain, himself, for he had to be conversant with the river's currents, shifting channels and submerged snags and rocks, all of which posed an immediate and potentially fatal danger to the crew. Against this intoxicating dream, the tedium of school held little sway. He never got beyond Grade 5 but, instead, read avidly at home or in the library.
"Some people get an education without going to college. The rest get it after they get out."

Stanza 4: While training for his pilot's licence, he persuaded his younger brother to work with him. When the boiler exploded and he was killed, Twain was guilt-stricken and never forgave himself. He claimed to have foreseen the death in a dream a month earlier which, in turn, inspired his later interest in parapsychology.

Stanza 5: Civil War broke out in 1861 curtailing traffic along the river. In a bid for excitement and cash, he then headed out on a stagecoach for Nevada and California. His aim, however, to make a fortune and be a savior for his family didn't pan out (prospecting for silver and gold) and he relied, instead, on journalism to make his living.
*His pseudonym, Mark Twain, derived from his steamboat days, meaning: the second mark on a line measuring depth, signifying two fathoms or twelve feet, a safe depth for a river boat.

Stanza 6: He became one of the best known storytellers in the West, honing a distinctive narrative style - friendly, funny, irreverent, often satirical and always eager to deflate the pretentious. One of his tales about life in a mining camp was the start of his big break: Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog.
But his national appeal was consolidated in The Innocents Abroad. On a five month sea cruise in the Mediterranean, he wrote humorously about the sights for American newspapers with a view to getting a book published. He succeeded. He also met his future wife, Olivia Langdon, who would introduce him to the smart, cultured and politically savvy set of New York.

Stanza 7: Via his wife, he met abolitionists and activists who sought to end slavery as well as promote equal rights generally. Among them, was Harriet Beecher Stowe. He would later arrange to build a house next door to her in Hartford, Connecticut.

Stanza 8: Twain wrote many of his classic novels during his seventeen year period in Hartford and twenty summers spent in Elmira, NY on his wife's sister's farm. Among them, of course, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1984, known as the Great American Novel) but also The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889).
In his stories of Sawyer and Finn, his immense skill lies in his ability to capture the vernacular speech of classes along the Mississippi and he was the first person to put this vocabulary into American writing. In his original and engaging style, he turns the fears, fantasies and dreams of childhood in an obscure southern American town into universal experiences, still resonating today. Controversially, these novels have been criticised for reflecting historic portrayals of slavery and racism, current at the time.

Stanza 9-10: Despite his characteristic humour and optimism for life, Twain lapsed into depression during his latter years, not least as a result of the closely followed deaths of his dear wife and two of his three children. He was also beset by debt (poor investments), a position he had long sought to avoid, recalling his own parents' impoverished lifestyle.
In his usual inimitable style, referring to his entry into the world with Halley's comet and stating he would be disappointed if he didn't leave with it, he predicted the Almighty saying:
"Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together."
Eerily accurate, he died of a heart attack a month before the comet passed Earth that year.

A prolific writer, producing twenty-eight books as well as numerous stories and essays, he has been praised as the Father of American Literature and the greatest humorist the United States has produced. In his last fifteen years, he became, probably, the most celebrated American in the world.

"Focus more on your dream than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself."

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