A01_LEVY3754_01_SE_FM.QXD 6/5/10 1:41 PM Page i. Mark Twain

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1 A01_LEVY3754_01_SE_FM.QXD 6/5/10 1:41 PM Page i Mark Twain

2 A01_LEVY3754_01_SE_FM.QXD 6/5/10 1:41 PM Page ii Mark Twain, (Photolibrary.com)

3 A01_LEVY3754_01_SE_FM.QXD 6/5/10 1:41 PM Page iii David W. Levy David Ross Boyd Professor of History, Emeritus The University of Oklahoma Mark Twain The Divided Mind of America s Best-Loved Writer THE LIBRARY OF AMERICAN BIOGRAPHY Edited by Mark C. Carnes Prentice Hall Boston Columbus Indianapolis New York San Francisco Upper Saddle River Amsterdam Cape Town Dubai London Madrid Milan Munich Paris Montreal Toronto Delhi Mexico City São Paulo Sydney Hong Kong Seoul Singapore Taipei Tokyo

4 A01_LEVY3754_01_SE_FM.QXD 6/5/10 1:41 PM Page iv Executive Editor: Ed Parsons Editorial Assistant: Amanda A. Dykstra Senior Marketing Manager: Maureen E. Prado Roberts Marketing Assistant: Marissa O Brien Operations Specialist: Renata Butera Cover Designer: Karen Salzbach Creative Art Director: Jayne Conte Manager, Visual Research: Beth Brenzel Manager, Rights & Permissions: Zina Arabia For Richard and Linnea Manager, Cover Visual Research & Permissions: Karen Sanatar Cover Illustration: Mark Twain Memorial House & Museum Full-Service Project Management: Joseph Barnabas Malcolm, PreMediaGlobal Composition: PreMediaGlobal Printer/Binder: Edward Brothers Cover Printer: Lehigh-Phoenix Color/Hagerstown Text Font: Sabon Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levy, David W. Mark Twain: the divided mind of America s best-loved writer / David W. Levy. p. cm. (The library of American biography) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: ISBN-10: Twain, Mark, Authors, American 19th century Biography. 3. Humorists, American Biography. I. Title. PS1331.L dc Photo credits and acknowledgments borrowed from other sources and reproduced, with permission, in this textbook appear on appropriate page within the text. Copyright 2011 Pearson Education, Inc., publishing as Prentice Hall. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. This publication is protected by Copyright, and permission should be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise. To obtain permission(s) to use material from this work, please submit a written request to Pearson Education, Inc., Permissions Department, One Lake Street, Upper Saddle River, NJ Many of the designations by manufacturers and seller to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and the publisher was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in initial caps or all caps. ISBN-10: ISBN-13:

5 A01_LEVY3754_01_SE_FM.QXD 6/5/10 1:41 PM Page v Contents Editor s Preface vi Acknowledgments viii Prologue 1 PART ONE PREPARATION 13 Chapter 1 Growing up in Hannibal 14 Chapter 2 The Great Mississippi 31 Chapter 3 A Young Man Goes West 46 Chapter 4 Making God s Creatures Laugh 63 Chapter 5 A Cynic Among the Pilgrims 77 Chapter 6 Livy 96 PART TWO FAME 115 Chapter 7 Hartford 116 Chapter 8 A Writer of Remarkable Books 131 Chapter 9 The Best Book We ve Had 149 PART THREE DESPAIR 161 Chapter 10 A Writer Who Thought He Was a Businessman 162 Chapter 11 Writing His Way Out of Debt 176 Chapter 12 At the End, Dark Despair 192 Epilogue 211 Study and Discussion Questions 217 A Note on the Sources 221 Index 227 v

6 A01_LEVY3754_01_SE_FM.QXD 6/5/10 1:41 PM Page vi Editor s Preface In many respects, Mark Twain is an anomalous figure: a humorist who is among America s first notable writers of serious literature; a celebrity in a nation that has rarely made celebrities of its writers; an author whose immense popularity in his own time has been superseded by his posthumous legacy. Indeed, he is the only professional writer to be profiled in the Library of American Biography, a collection that presents the lives of those who best illuminate the American past. Why was Twain the foremost writer of an age that included many literary titans? Why has he grown in stature while most of the others have faded? And why should one seeking to understand America s Gilded Age a term coined by Twain himself read a book about Twain rather than his own distinctive words on the subject? The answer to each of these questions relates to another of Twain s anomalous qualities. Most successful writers are keen observers whose critical faculties are improved by a measure of distance from their subjects: Charles Dickens, writing from his comfortable Victorian study, laid bare the inequities of a British legal and economic system that his peers regarded as the envy of the world; Harriet Beecher Stowe, a comfortable Northerner, rendered the inhumanity of a slave system that white Southerners had accepted as a way of life. Twain, by contrast, made his name with wickedly comic accounts of his own lived experience (Innocents Abroad, Life on the Mississippi) and propelled it to greatness with fiction that drew heavily on his small-town, vi

7 A01_LEVY3754_01_SE_FM.QXD 6/5/10 1:41 PM Page vii E DITOR S P REFACE * vii Southern childhood and nomadic young adult years (Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn). A journalist by profession and an inveterate traveler by choice, Twain was as sharp an observer as his literary peers. But he often lacked the requisite distance from his subjects to regard them with detachment. In these pages, David W. Levy, a renowned scholar and teacher of American intellectual history, argues that Twain s work reveals intense and conflicting reactions toward the enormous industrial, economic, and social change he witnessed in America during his lifetime. To be sure, Twain, a born cynic, found plenty to criticize. Indeed, few writers have viewed the failings of their own societies with such bitterness. In the final section of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur s Court, for example, Twain describes how 25,000 knights in plumed helmets are blasted by dynamite, electrocuted by high-voltage fences, and sliced up by Gatling guns. Their rotting corpses spread disease. This is, quite literally, overkill a hijacking of a funny novel into dark realms, for Twain was intent on denouncing both the chivalric impulse that led Southerners into the Civil War and the brutal efficiency with which Northern factories crafted the machinery of slaughter. But Twain s criticism of America s elite and powerful was never that of an outsider. While Twain sniffed at the trappings of social status, he was building a grand house in Hartford and sporting distinctive white suits; while satirizing the restless pursuit of money, he was scheming to get more of it for himself; while poking fun at the mechanical contrivances of the modern age, he was exhausting his savings to invest in dubious new inventions. American people understood that Twain was one of them: they perceived that he did not so much write about American life as live it. The publication of this biography coincides with the hundredth anniversary of Twain s death. It is a fitting memorial. With wit, humor, and consummate craftsmanship, Levy illuminates the intersection of an extraordinary writer with extraordinary times an ideal match of biographer and subject. MARK C. CARNES ANN WHITNEY OLIN PROFESSOR OF HISTORY BARNARD COLLEGE/COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

8 A01_LEVY3754_01_SE_FM.QXD 6/5/10 1:41 PM Page viii Acknowledgments Over the years, I have had the pleasure of discussing Mark Twain and various of his works with hundreds of undergraduates at the University of Oklahoma. It is a pleasure to acknowledge here the numerous ideas and insights that I have gained from those discussions. Two good friends, Robert Shalhope and Melvin Urofsky, rendered me the generous service of reading through the entire manuscript at an early stage; they will recognize many of their helpful comments and suggestions in this final version. Mark Carnes, the general editor of the Library of American Biography series, has been a model of what an editor should be a source of very sound advice and generous encouragement. There is scarcely a page in this book that has not been considerably improved by the editorial assistance of Amanda Dykstra. Her sure hand, sharp eye, sympathetic expertise, and steady good sense have made working with her a genuine pleasure. Finally, to my wife Lynne, I owe, as usual, enormous gratitude for her unfailing support and daily help in a thousand ways; I have become accustomed to her sacrifices on my behalf, but hope that I have never taken them for granted. DAVID W. LEVY DAVID ROSS BOYD PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, EMERITUS THE UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA viii