Mark Twain
Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was one of America's most celebrated writers, humorists, and social critics. His works, including classics like
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, captured the essence of American life in the 19th century. Twain's life spanned a period of rapid change in the United States, from westward expansion and the Civil War to industrialization and American imperialism. Like many artists of the age, he experienced personal triumphs and tragedies, financial highs and lows, and left an indelible mark on literature, Ernest Hemingway himself once stating that "
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn'."
Early Life and Childhood
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born prematurely on November 30, 1835, in the small village of Florida, Missouri, as the sixth of seven children to John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton Clemens. Of his birth, Twain would later state in 1909:
"I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together."
Only three of Twain's siblings—Orion, Pamela, and Henry—survived to adulthood. The family struggled financially, with John's ventures often failing, pinning hopes on a large tract of Tennessee land that never yielded wealth, which Twain later described as a family curse that fostered unrealistic dreams.
In 1839, the Clemens family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a bustling Mississippi River port town that would profoundly influence Twain's writing. Hannibal served as the model for the fictional St. Petersburg in
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain's childhood itself was a mix of idyllic adventures and harsh realities. He and his friends, including Tom Blankenship (who would later become the inspiration for Huckleberry Finn), played pirates and explorers, drawing from books by authors like James Fenimore Cooper and Sir Walter Scott, writers of the famous
Last of the Mohicans and
Ivanhoe respectively.
Summers were spent at his uncle John Quarles's farm near Florida, Missouri, where he heard folktales from an enslaved man named Uncle Daniel, elements of which appeared in his depiction of Jim in
Huckleberry Finn.
However, tragedy struck early: siblings Margaret (1830) and Benjamin (1842) died young, and Twain himself survived a measles epidemic, having deliberately exposed himself to it in a do-or-die gamble with fate. He witnessed violence in Hannibal, including a shooting and the discovery of a drowned fugitive slave, experiences that would go on to influence the darker themes present in his works.
In 1843–1844, the family moved into what is now known as the Mark Twain Boyhood Home, but financial woes forced them to relocate temporarily to the Pilaster House between 1846–1847. John Clemens died of pneumonia on March 24, 1847, plunging the family deeper into poverty and ending Twain's formal education after the fifth grade.
Apprenticeship and Early Career
Following his father's death, the family returned to the Boyhood Home, and young Samuel took on odd jobs to support them. In 1848, at age 12, he apprenticed as a printer for Joseph Ament at the
Missouri Courier newspaper in Hannibal, where he honed his writing skills amid sparse living conditions.
By 1850, his brother Orion returned to Hannibal, purchased the
Western Union newspaper, and employed Samuel as a typesetter and contributor. That year, Samuel also joined the Cadets of Temperance, a youth organization promoting moderation of or total sobriety from alcohol.
In 1852, while Orion was away, Samuel edited the newspaper and submitted his first sketches to publications like the
Saturday Evening Post, and published
The Dandy Frightening the Squatter, his first short story, to
The Carpet Bag, America's first humor magazine at the age of 16.
Seeking broader horizons, he left Hannibal in June 1853 to work as a journeyman printer in St. Louis, New York, and Philadelphia, self-educating himself in libraries along the way. Orion moved the family to Iowa that year, ending their Hannibal residence. In 1854, Samuel visited Washington, D.C., and spent the summer in Muscatine, Iowa, working at Orion's
Muscatine Journal, a daily local newspaper. He wintered in St. Louis in 1855, then moved to Keokuk, Iowa, for Orion's
Daily Post until fall 1856, before heading to Cincinnati, Ohio as a printing assistant.
Fulfilling a childhood dream (to say the least of it, as it was practically an obsession during his boyhood and he held the station in high reverence) Twain apprenticed as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River under Captain Horace Bixby aboard the Paul Jones starting in April 1857. After more than two years of rigorous training, he earned his full pilot's license on April 9, 1859. This period was formative; the river's dangers and lore inspired his pen name "Mark Twain" (meaning "two fathoms deep," safe water for navigation) and later works like
Life on the Mississippi in 1883. Tragically, his brother Henry died in a steamboat explosion in 1858, an event that haunted Twain and sparked his interest in parapsychology—the study of psychic phenomenon ranging from telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, psychokinesis and so on—given Twain claimed to have foreseen his death in a dream a month earlier. Twain was stricken with guilt, and blamed himself in part, though became an early member of the Society for Psychical Research.
The outbreak of the Civil War in 1861 halted river commerce, ending Twain's piloting career. He briefly visited Hannibal before enlisting as a second lieutenant in the Confederate Marion Rangers, a ragtag militia that disbanded after two weeks—an experience he later satirized in
The Private History of a Campaign That Failed. In July 1861, Twain traveled by stagecoach to Carson City, Nevada, with Orion, who had been appointed secretary to the territorial governor.
Western Adventures, Overseas Travels and Rise as a Writer
In Nevada, Twain tried his hand at mining on the Comstock Lode but failed, turning instead to journalism. In August 1862, he became a reporter for the
Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada, where his humorous sketches gained popularity. Here, on February 3, 1863, he first used the pseudonym "
Mark Twain" in print. These early experiences in the American West served as inspiration for his semi-biographical work
Roughing It, later published in 1872.
"Your breath comes short and quick, you are feverish with excitement; the dinner-bell may ring its clapper off, you pay no attention; friends may die, weddings transpire, houses burn down, they are nothing to you; you sweat and dig and delve with a frantic interest—and all at once you strike it!" - Mark Twain on the miner's life in Rouging It
In May 1864, Twain moved to San Francisco, working for the
San Francisco Call and befriending writers like Bret Harte, most famous for his romantic tales of the Californian Gold Rush. In 1865, he visited Angels Camp in California's Jackass Hill, where he heard the tale that became
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County—a story which highlighted the culture of both gambling and the telling of tall-tales that existed in California at the time—published on November 18, 1865, in the New York Saturday Press. This story brought him national fame.
"He was the curiosest man about always betting on any thing that turned up you ever see, if he could get any body to bet on the other side; and if he couldn't, he'd change sides." - The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
In 1866, Twain traveled to the Sandwich Islands (known today as Hawaii) as a correspondent for the
Sacramento Union, later delivering his first public lecture on the trip upon return, itself based on his popular letters to the
Union. This collection of letters would later be published as a book in 1947, titled
Letters from Hawaii, which detailed his noteworthy experiences while on the islands.
"No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but that one, no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done." - Letters From Hawaii
In June 1867, he joined the newspaper funded Quaker City steamboat excursion to the Mediterranean, with further stops across the rest of Europe and the Middle East, experiences he would chronicle in
The Innocents Abroad.
The Innocents Abroad, for its part, established Mark Twain as a travel writer and a humorist, and was the best-selling work of his lifetime, and remains one of the most sold travel books of all time. Twain's perception of tourism was a stark contrast to the works of his contemporaries, who had a mind towards what he considered the over-commercialization of history and culture. Twain was proud of America's youth, practicality and skeptical mindset, and saw little value in the common tourist clichés—especially oft-repeated, bland anecdotes or needless exaggerations of grandeur.
Some of his most scathing criticism was directed at European Catholicism itself. Twain was merciless about the endless relics—bones, pieces of the so-called "True Cross" of Jesus and shreds of saints’ clothing—that every church seemed to claim.
"There is enough of the true cross in Rome to build a ship."
He watched how Catholic pilgrims slavishly kissed and rubbed the art and statues of Saints and other Christian figures.
"There are so many holy places in Italy where people kiss the same old black image and rub the same old toe, that it is a wonder the images and toes are not entirely worn away."
Further ridicule is paid to the tales of the Saints themselves, regarded by many a tour guide about their great miracles and indulgences.
"If all the miracles they tell of had really happened, the Saviour would have been kept busy working them the whole twenty-four hours of every day for three years."
Twain too, criticized how Catholic cathedrals were drenched in gold, art, and finery while the surrounding towns were often impoverished. Visiting St. Peter's in Rome, he laments:
"The poor wretches outside… how much of their scant earnings have been wrung from them to make a marble wonder that they are not allowed to enter freely?"
And he even goes as far as to criticize the very Priests themselves, further remarking on how sales-like and relic-mongering the supposedly sacred Church was.
"The priest who showed us the church did not seem to know anything about it except the names of the saints, and he reeled them off with the same mechanical indifference with which a telephone girl says ‘Line busy.’"
Twain's greatest distaste of all however, was reserved for his visits to the "Holy Land" itself. Even on approach, Twain had nothing but a seeming distaste for the Biblical lands of what are known today as Israel and Palestine, utterly dismantling the expectations of what many Christian American readers back home would have held.
"Of all the lands there are for dismal scenery, I think Palestine must be the prince… It is a hopeless, dreary, heart-broken land... A land without a spirit… given over wholly to weeds and desolation."
Everywhere he goes, Twain is shown Catholic chapels and shrines claiming to be the exact spot of a Biblical event—with as little credibility behind them as you would expect. In Bethlehem itself, he remarks:
"Here they say the Saviour was born; in that niche the Virgin nursed Him; that is the very manger He lay in. It is the fashion to believe it. It does not matter whether it is true or not."
Yet again, he comments about the gaudy commercialization of it all, despite its apparent untruth.
"There is no record of a solitary thing that ever happened in Palestine that is not shown, in some place or other, to visitors, for money... The monks never forget to keep a sharp look-out for pilgrims; and they never fail to show them exactly where the Saviour stood, or sat, or knelt, or slept, or wept. And then they pass the hat (an old turn of phrase to refer to the prompting of donations)."
For all the Biblical descriptions of the region and its apparent beauty, Twain himself is none too impressed by the "Holy Land."
"Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes… desolate and unlovely… It is dreamland."
Twain, ultimately, finds any and all illusions shattered. He realizes nations described in the Old Testament could more than easily fit inside many American states and counties, and that the "kings" of those nations might very well have ruled over fewer people than could be found in small towns back home. In the end, he makes no secret of his detestation.
"If all the poetry and nonsense that have been discharged upon the fountains and the bland scenery of this region were collected in a book, it would make a most valuable volume to burn."
The trip, however, was not without its high points for Twain. It was on this trip that Twain met fellow passenger Charles Langdon, who showed him a picture of his sister, Olivia. Twain would say it was love at first sight, and the two corresponded through 1868, though Olivia would reject his initial proposal.
Marriage, Friends, Family, and Literary Peak
Twain continued to court Olivia, and the two would be married in Elmira, New York on February 2, 1870. They settled in Buffalo, where their son Langdon was born on November 7, 1870, but he died of diphtheria at 19 months in 1872. The couple had three daughters: Olivia Susan "Susy" (born March 19, 1872), Clara (born June 8, 1874), and Jane "Jean" (born July 26, 1880). In October 1871, they moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where Twain built an elaborate Victorian home (now the Mark Twain House) in 1874, adjacent to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Summers were spent at Quarry Farm in Elmira, a productive writing retreat for Twain.
Though Mark Twain was typically considered more conservative minded in his views (in the context of the time), he nonetheless kept his mind open, and associated with many contemporary liberals through his wife, never closing his mind to new viewpoints, and even admitting later in life that his views changed considerably over his lifetime. He was, as many noted, a great friend to scientific and social progress, speaking strongly in favor of the abolition of slavery and the right of women to vote, ahead of many others of the time.
Perhaps nothing symbolizes Twain's fondness for science better than the friendship he forged with none other than Nikola Tesla. Tesla himself recounted "w
hen I was a young man in Europe (during the 1870s), I was ill for a long time. I read many of Mark Twain’s books and they gave me so much happiness that I recovered. And now, here he was, in my laboratory.”
Twain was apparently moved to tears by the sentiment, and spent much time in Tesla's laboratory, and even developed several inventive patents of his own; including a self-pasting scrapbook with dried adhesive on the pages which simply needed to be moistened prior to use. He also incorporated the advances of science in his work, with one of his tales utilizing fingerprinting forensics a mere year after its first legal recognition.
It was the 1870s period that marked Twain's greatest literary output. In 1872,
Roughing It was published, followed by
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873, co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner), satirizing post-Civil War corruption, credit and land speculation. It was, in fact, this very novel which gave the post-Civil War era its name of
the Gilded Age.
"No country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more." - The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today
In 1876, Twain published
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer—one of his greatest recognized works—a coming of age tale. It features the eponymous Tom Sawyer, a mischievous and adventurous boy, as he navigates childhood with his friends—most notably Huckleberry Finn and Joe Harper. Tom’s escapades range from lighthearted mischief (convincing other boys to whitewash a fence for him, playing pirates on Jackson’s Island, and wooing classmate Becky Thatcher) to darker experiences (witnessing a murder in a graveyard, being lost in a cave, and testifying against the villain Injun Joe, who he had witnessed committing said murder). Despite his wild spirit, Tom matures through the course of the story. By its end, he demonstrates bravery, loyalty, and a deeper sense of moral responsibility, the story itself displaying how imagination can prepare children for the very real struggles they will face in life, while also serving as a satire on the curious expectations of adult society.
"Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. 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 attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do." - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
After the release of
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain would continue to have a prodigious run over the course of the next decade, first releasing the famous
The Prince and the Pauper in 1881 after several business trips to Canada to secure copyrights. The novel is set in 16th-century England, during the reign of Henry VIII. It follows two boys who are physically identical but come from vastly different worlds: Edward Tudor, the young Prince of Wales, heir to the English throne, and Tom Canty, a poor boy living in Offal Court, the slums of London.
Through chance, they meet near the palace. Fascinated by each other’s lives, they switch clothes as a game—only for events to spiral out of control. Tom, dressed as the prince, is mistaken for Edward and carried into the royal household, while Edward, dressed as Tom, is cast out and mistaken for a beggar. Edward, while trying to reclaim his rightful position, experiences firsthand the harsh realities of poverty, injustice, and cruelty faced by commoners, whereas Tom is swept into the luxury and responsibilities of royal life, struggling to act the part of prince while avoiding exposure. Twain highlights the vast divide between rich and poor in Tudor England. The novel critiques cruelty in laws, harsh treatment of the destitute, and systemic injustice. By living in each other’s shoes, both boys learn empathy. Edward’s rule becomes more compassionate because he has lived in poverty, while Tom gains humility and perspective from experiencing royalty.
"When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved." - The Prince and the Pauper
Two years later, Twain would publish the aforementioned
Life on the Mississippi, part memoir, part history, and part travelogue. Twain recounts his youthful experiences as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before the Civil War, then contrasts them with his later return to the river years afterward. The book blends autobiography, river lore, cultural commentary, and Twain’s now trademark humor, giving both a personal and historical portrait of the great American river.
"Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates." - Life on the Mississippi
Twain would go on to publish a sequel to
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1884—
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which to this day is considered the quintessential "Great American Novel". The story continues the life of Huck Finn from the previous novel, as he escapes his abusive father and the constraints of “civilized” society, drifting down the Mississippi River with Jim, a runaway enslaved man seeking freedom. Along the way, the pair encounter dangers, conmen, and moral dilemmas that test Huck’s conscience. Though taught that helping Jim is a sin, (with it having been beaten into Huck that slaves were property and that helping Jim was thus the sin of theft), Huck defies his fear of the Christian Hell and decides to help his friend no matter what, boldly declaring "
All right, then, I'll go to hell".
Their journey becomes both a literal quest for freedom and a satire of what Twain considered contemporary American hypocrisy, exposing the cruelty, greed, and prejudice underlying supposedly respectable society.
"Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better." - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court rounded out Twain's productive 1880s. The story follows one Hank Morgan, a 19th-century engineer from Connecticut who, after a blow to the head, wakes up in the medieval world of King Arthur’s England. Using his modern knowledge of science, technology, and industry, Hank convinces the people he is a powerful magician and gains a high position at Arthur’s court. He attempts to modernize the feudal society by introducing inventions like gunpowder, telegraphs, and schools, believing he can bring enlightenment and progress to the Dark Ages. However, his efforts to reform society ultimately fail—his technology leads to mass destruction, his influence collapses, and he is left alienated in a world that cannot sustain his modern ideals. The novel ends tragically, with Hank’s dreams of progress turned to ruin.
Here, Twain mocks the common romanticization of the Middle Ages popular in his time, and suggests that, even if one was to go back in time and introduce the superstitious, rigid, Christian minds of the time to the technology and conveniences of today, that it would ultimately be worthless. Worse, it could even be dangerous, as Twain evidently believed that scientific progress alone could not replace moral and social betterment. Hank, though well-intentioned, becomes the very tyranny he sought to destroy, and one can clearly note the growing skepticism of Twain had in imperialist attitudes and exceptionalism, which would define much of his perspective in the decade to come.
"There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves." - A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Social Commentary, Financial Struggles, World Tour, and Final Years
Before 1899, Twain was largely in favor of imperialism, having spoken strongly in favor of American interests in the Hawaiian Islands and elsewhere, stating that America's war with Spain in 1898 (which notably netted America sovereignty over Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, as well as a Cuban Protectorate) was the worthiest war ever fought.
A single year later, was one could tell by the themes present in
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Twain's mind had quickly and overwhelmingly turned about. In the
New York Herald of October 16, 1900, Twain describes his political "awakening".
"I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific ... Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? ... I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves.
But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the Treaty of Paris (which ended the Spanish–American War), and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.
It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land."
It was not, however, only American imperialism that Twain had grown immensely critical of. King Leopold II of Belgium, and the "Scramble for Africa" at large also received no shortage of venom. As Vice-President of the Anti-Imperialist League starting 1901, Twain wrote political pamphlets for the organization, the most notable of which was perhaps
King Leopold's Soliloquy.
In it, the fictionalized Leopold claims that his critics only speak of things that make his image look negative, such as the unfair taxes that he levied upon the people of the Congo, which caused starvation and the extermination of entire villages, (not to mention other massacres) but not of the fact that he had sent missionaries to the villages to convert them to Christianity, which was apparently such a noble thing that he figured it utterly outweighed "
a little starvation."
Twain's political mindset was, for its part, very heavily shaped by the various events of his 1890s. Though it can be said his perspective on the world grew darker, it could not be said he grew bitter, as Twain felt more strongly about the injustices of the world more fiercely than ever, after having experienced so much hardship of his own.
By the early 1890s, Twain's fortunes had begun to unravel due to a combination of ill-fated business ventures and economic pressures. His publishing house, Charles L. Webster & Co., founded in 1884, had initially thrived with successes like the
Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which sold extraordinarily well through innovative door-to-door marketing by Civil War veterans, and Twain's own immense success in
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
However, subsequent publications by the house faltered, draining resources and leading Twain to describe the enterprise as a "
lingering suicide." The company's debts mounted, exacerbating Twain's financial strain.
Compounding this was Twain's disastrous investment in the Paige Compositor, an ambitious mechanical typesetting machine invented by James W. Paige. Twain, leveraging his background as a former printer, first invested $5,000 in 1880 after viewing an early prototype, convinced it would revolutionize printing by automating typesetting at speeds up to 12,000 ems per hour—three times faster than manual methods. By 1884, fueled by royalties from Huckleberry Finn, he escalated funding to $4,000 monthly (about $125,000 in today's dollars).
However, by 1890, Twain's publishing house collapsed, forcing the family to relocate to Europe for cheaper living. The Paige project continued to falter amid Paige's perfectionism, leading to endless redesigns and missed market opportunities. A 1892 private ANPA test confirmed its speed, sparking thousands of orders, but by 1893, a contract for 3,000 units dissolved after a 1894 trial at the
Chicago Herald & Post revealed breakdowns and inefficiencies. The machine's 18,000 parts made it uneconomical compared to the simpler Linotype, which went on to dominate the market, rendering the Paige Compositor effectively worthless, with only a single machine surviving to this day at the Mark Twain House in Hartford.
Twain's total investment reached $180,000 (nearly $7 million today), drawn from royalties and his wife Olivia's inheritance, with overall funding hitting $2 million. In March 1894, advised by financier Henry H. Rogers of Standard Oil, Twain transferred assets to Olivia to shield them. He filed for bankruptcy in April 1894, owing $80,000 (about $2.4 million today) to creditors including authors and banks. Headlines blared "Mark Twain is Ruined," and the family sold their Hartford home at a fraction of its value. Vowing to repay all debts morally if not legally, Twain turned to lecturing for financial redemption.
To settle his debts, Twain embarked on a year-long global lecture tour from July 1895 to July 1896, managed by Major James B. Pond in North America and Robert Sparrow Smythe overseas. Billed as "
Mark Twain at Home" abroad and simply "
Mark Twain" in North America, the tour aimed to capitalize on his fame while documenting experiences for a new book.
After the long venture through America, Twain would go on to tour Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, India, Mauritius, and South Africa—experiences which would all heavily shape Twain's evolving worldview as he saw to all manners of beauty and horror alike, but few things seemed to affect him more than the inequities he paid witness to. Nowhere is this more present than the idiocy Twain sees present in Christian missionaries.
Twain had noted his distaste for missionaries and their work earlier in his
Letters to Hawaii:
"The missionary’s statement that Christianity was flourishing in the islands was true. It was also true that the population was disappearing. Under the gospel teaching it had fallen from two hundred thousand to eight thousand in fifty years. The work had been well done — nothing left to save. Christianity and Civilization have done their work and done it well; there are but few natives left to Christianize.”
This sentiment had not changed in the book born from the culmination of his world tour,
Following the Equator. Again, Twain notes how the population among the pacific natives had shrunk to a fraction of its size despite the "
boon of civilization" as he called it brought to them by the missionaries. Here, however, he goes even further to criticize the religion's treatment of people despite its supposed morality.
"Common Christian charity, common humanity, does seem to require, not only that these people be returned to their homes, but that war, pestilence, and famine be introduced among them for their preservation."
In India, Twain offered much of the same criticism of the foolishness of the Christian missionaries as they tried and failed to convert the population.
"A few years ago this missionary was confident that the Christian religion would supplant the Hindoo in India within half a century. But that dream had gone to join the big majority of its predecessors. Each new missionary finds that his predecessor’s estimate of the progress of the gospel in India has been too large, and reduces it himself—reduces it again and again—and still again, until at last the figure is down to next to nothing, and the missionary goes home, worn out and discouraged."
As Twain himself rightly put it:
"Our (referring to the Christian religion brought over by the West) miracles are not effective; the Hindoos do not care for them; they have more extraordinary ones of their own."
The world tour was enlightening for Twain, and also generated substantial income, both through his speaking appearances and the eventual publication and selling of
Following the Equator. However, the tour was physically taxing; Twain, nearing 60, suffered from health issues and tragedy struck when daughter Susy died of meningitis on August 18, 1896, in Hartford while the family was abroad. Even despite this great tragedy, Twain cleared his debts, even including the ones he was no longer legally obligated to pay, earning him great acclaim as a man of integrity and honor after having returned to the United States following an extended stay living in Europe.
Susy's passing, sadly, was only the beginning of a somber period for Twain. His wife, Olivia died on June 5, 1904, in Italy, after a long illness. Then, daughter Jean died of an epileptic seizure on December 24, 1909.
Despite all this, Twain carried on. He began work on his autobiography during this time, and founded the Angel Fish and Aquarium Club for young girls whom he viewed as surrogate granddaughters. To say the least, he was fond of them, inviting them to concerts and the theater, describing the club as his life's "chief delight" in these latter years. Yale and Oxford would also grant him honorary degrees around this time.
Health declining further, Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut, at age 74, his prophecy fulfilled, with Halley's comet returning to earth just after he passed.
President William Howard Taft was among those who honored Twain, declaring:
"Mark Twain gave pleasure – real intellectual enjoyment – to millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasure to millions yet to come ... His humor was American, but he was nearly as much appreciated by Englishmen and people of other countries as by his own countrymen. He has made an enduring part of American literature."
Anti-Christian Thoughts and Zevist Perspectives
Twain's stance on Christianity, particularly later in life, was no secret. However, he was in fact so thoroughly anti-Christian that his own family briefly chose to suppress some of his works which contained the most blunt of his opinions. From his own autobiography, one can see Twain at some of his most unreserved in regarding the Christian religion:
"There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing, and predatory as it is – in our country particularly and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree – it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime – the invention of Hell. Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor his Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilled."
Though it hardly ended there. In another statement in the same biography, Twain not only again offered his loathing of Christianity, but heaped praise upon the ancients.
"The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born."
Perhaps most revealing of all, Twain was aware of Christianity's nature as something destructive of race and patriotism.
"Patriotism is a high and holy thing. It will remain a high and holy thing, and jointly admirable and praiseworthy, Christianity will never change it. Its noble doctrine of universal brotherhood is for the angels, if for anybody -- it is not possible for men. Christianity cannot teach a fish to fly nor aliens to love each other. We can not even imagine a heaven where there are no frontiers -- where all foreigners -- including Satan's people -- are brothers, and Patriotism is a vice unknown. ... By the law of his religion a Christian must labor for the breaking down of all walls that interrupt the fusion of the race into a common brotherhood, and one of the most formidable of these is Patriotism; it marches with every frontier in the world." - Notebook #32a, June-July 1897
Twain, for his part, did indeed believe in a God, and perhaps in a similar Deist sense as Washington, given Twain had outright said he did not believe in the Biblical scriptures despite believing in an almighty godhead or providence. It should also be noted Twain was a Master degree Freemason himself, similar indeed to Washington.
Twain did not only regard Christianity with such venom in statements, but in his works as well.
Letters from the Earth was one of the posthumously published books, structured as a series of letters written by Satan to the Archangels Gabriel and Michael. Through Satan, Twain ridicules every aspect of Christianity, from people being cast into Hell for minor infractions, for Heaven's portrayal as a place where people go to sing hymns for all eternity (as if this was a thing humans desire to do), and how Christianity distorts the human experience instead of uplifting it (with how human sexuality is regarded as "sinful" being a particular target).
"Heaven for climate, Hell for company." - Letter III, Letters from Earth
Though Twain intentionally cultivated something of a rustic persona, he was by all accounts, extremely well-read himself, owning a library of not only contemporary works, but the Greek and Roman classics, which he greatly enjoyed reading to his wife. As strong as Twain's anti-Christian sentiments were, they were not the be-all end-all of his classical influences.
The Mysterious Stranger, another posthumous story, again features a character named Satan. It should be noted that many of Twain's final works reflected his mindset after several losses and his revealing worldwide journey, and as such have a certain cynicism to them—both literally in the sense that they can be seen as pessimistic about the nature of reality, and in the sense that they echo elements of the Greek school of Cynic thought. Despite these darker outlooks, Twain's understanding of classical thought is still apparent.
The character of Satan here takes on a role similar to Socrates in Plato's work. He probes the central characters' assumptions about existence and humanity through questions, demonstrations, and paradoxes with a dialectical method, and reality itself is revealed to be an illusion in a similar manner to Plato's own allegory of the cave, with Twain going further and suggesting the only truly existing thing is the Solipsistic self, echoing schools of thought like Advaita Vedanta Hinduism. Satan, in a line that feels like it's straight out of Edgar Allan Poe's own work, comments "
life itself is only a vision, a dream." As one would expect by now, Christian doctrine and morals are again ridiculed and torn apart, as he contrasts their supposed goodness with the religion's outcomes in the form of crusades and witch hunts.
Though both these texts had something of a cynical, pessimistic view of life, the aptly named
My Platonic Sweetheart, itself also posthumously published, serves as something of a spiritual counterpoint.
Told in the first person, Twain’s narrator recounts a strange phenomenon that has persisted throughout his life. From the age of sixteen, he has experienced recurring dreams in which he meets the same young woman. The setting of each dream varies—sometimes an ancient city, sometimes a modern one, or even imagined worlds—but the woman is always the same soul, appearing with different names, ages, or appearances, yet always recognizably herself. The two share an immediate, wordless intimacy and understanding, as if they have known each other forever. They never behave as strangers; there is no awkwardness, no need for introduction. Over the years, the narrator comes to realize that this recurring figure is not a figment of random dreaming but something deeper — a spiritual or metaphysical companion, whom he calls his "Platonic Sweetheart."
The story ends not with a resolution, but a kind of serene acceptance: the narrator believes that the soul is capable of meeting its twin in the dream realm, and that these encounters hint at an immortal continuity of spirit beyond the limits of the body. The title itself refers directly to Plato’s philosophy of love, especially as expressed in the
Symposium and
Phaedrus. In Plato’s view, true love (eros) is not physical but spiritual — a recognition between souls who once shared unity before birth and now seek reunion. Twain’s dream-woman is exactly this kind of ideal form of love: pure, eternal, and untouched by the entropy of physical life, and their connection mirrors the Platonic idea of
anamnesis; the soul remembering something it knew before birth.
As the narrator puts it himself, "
she is real. I know it. For her identity persists through all the changes; she has but one spirit, one soul." Again evoking Plato's allegory of the cave, it is the dream world in this story that is the World of Forms, where the waking world is that of the shadows on the wall. At one point in the story, the narrator dreams that he is in Athens with his sweetheart, and Socrates himself passes by.
Though the writings of Twain's latter years expressed a great deal of cynicism,
The Platonic Sweetheart demonstrated his romantic self still persisted despite his loss and hardships. In fact, Twain's most iconic representations all show him in a white suit, which was something he began making a point of only after the death of his wife. In his own words, he preferred the cheeriness of his white wardrobe, and found black clothes a "
depressing captivity". In this regard, it seems apparent Twain was never truly willing to let bitterness take him entirely, and he remained a champion of the downtrodden, a great critic of Christian hypocrisy, and a prodigious writing talent, all the way to his last breath.
"The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why." - Mark Twain
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Sources
Mark Twain, A Biography: The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens - Harper & Bros, 1912
Inventing Mark Twain - Andrew Hoffman, 1997
Mark Twain: A Life - Ron Powers, 2005
The Life of Mark Twain:
The Early Years
The Middle Years
The Final Years - Gary Scharnhorst, 2018
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28803/28803-h/28803-h.htm - Works of Mark Twain Online Index
https://web.archive.org/web/2025021...wainmuseum.org/learn-with-us/twains-timeline/ - Timeline and other various resources (archived)
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