Who was Mark Twain and what did he actually believe?

Samuel Langhorne Clemens -- Mark Twain -- was born on 30 November 1835 in Florida, Missouri, a village of about a hundred people, and grew up in Hannibal on the Mississippi River. He was a printer's apprentice, a Mississippi riverboat pilot, a failed silver prospector, a journalist, a travel writer, a novelist, a lecturer, a publisher, a failed businessman, and eventually, in bankruptcy and grief, one of the bitterest social critics America has ever produced.

He took the pen name Mark Twain from a riverboat term for two fathoms of depth -- the minimum safe water for navigation. It is one of the better pen names in literary history.

What did he write?#

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) is the first Mark Twain novel most readers encounter -- a nostalgic, comic account of boyhood on the Mississippi. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is the more serious and more argued-over work: the story of Huck's journey down the river with the enslaved man Jim, which Hemingway called the source of all modern American literature.

His travel writing -- The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), A Tramp Abroad (1880) -- made him famous and established the persona: the plain-speaking American confronting European pretension and American pomposity with equal irreverence. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) is darker than it appears -- a time-travel satire that ends in mass slaughter.

His later work, much of it published posthumously, is bleaker still. The Mysterious Stranger (written 1897-1910, published 1916) presents existence as a cosmic joke played on creatures too small to understand it. Letters from the Earth (published 1962) is a savage satire of Christianity written from the perspective of Satan reporting to God on the strange beliefs of humanity.

What did he actually believe?#

This is the question his biography most insistently raises. The public Twain -- the white suit, the cigars, the wit -- projected a fundamental good humour that his private writing consistently contradicts.

He was a determinist: he believed that human beings have no free will, that every action is the product of prior causes, and that therefore praise and blame are equally meaningless. He wrote extensively about this in What Is Man? (1906), a dialogue in which an old man systematically demolishes a young man's belief in human moral agency.

He was a fierce opponent of imperialism, particularly American imperialism in the Philippines after 1898. His "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" (1901) is one of the sharpest anti-imperialist essays in American literature.

He lost his faith in Christianity after the death of his daughter Susy from meningitis in 1896, and after his wife Olivia's death in 1904, the bitterness that runs through his later unpublished work became something close to despair. He wrote in his autobiography, dictated in the last years of his life and published in full by the University of California Press in 2010: "I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning -- well knowing that I shall find in it the usual depravities and baseness and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race."

Why does Huckleberry Finn still generate argument?#

Huckleberry Finn is a genuinely uncomfortable novel in ways that Twain intended and that have not become less uncomfortable with time. Huck's journey with Jim forces a series of moral decisions on a boy who has been raised in a society that tells him slavery is God's order. The novel's argument -- worked out in action rather than stated -- is that individual conscience, when it develops honestly in contact with actual human beings, will reach more just conclusions than the moral codes of the society that produced it.

The novel also uses racial language with a frequency and specificity that has made it one of the most banned books in American school curricula since at least the 1950s. The arguments about whether and how to teach it are ongoing. Twain was satirising racist language and the society that produced it; whether that satirical intent survives the classroom context is a genuine and unresolved educational question.

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Further reading#

For the best Mark Twain books and reading order, the best Mark Twain books to read in order covers the full range.

For the American literary tradition Twain helped establish, classic books for people who don't usually read classics includes several accessible entry points.

Sources#

• Ron Powers, Mark Twain: A Life, Free Press, 2005
• Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1, University of California Press, 2010
• Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices, Oxford University Press, 1993