The Portable Mark Twain (86 page)

 

Clemens, Jane (1803-1890).
Born Jane Lampton, she married John Marshall Clemens in 1823. Besides Samuel, she was the mother of six other children. After the death of her husband, she depended on the support of her three surviving children, and Samuel Clemens continued to provide for her financial welfare until her death.

 

Clemens, Orion (1825-1897).
Oldest of Clemens's siblings, Orion was, among other things, an editor, farmer, lawyer, and the secretary for the Nevada Territory. Sam Clemens often became exasperated with his brother, for he was something of a dreamer who never quite succeeded at anything in life.

 

Crane, Susan (1836-1924).
She was the oldest sister of Olivia Langdon Clemens. She had been adopted by the Langdons after the death of her parents. The Clemens family spent their summers from 1870 to 1903 with Susan and Theodore Crane at Quarry Farm, on a hill overlooking Elmira, New York.

 

Downing, Major “Jack” (1834-1914).
Downing was a riverboat pilot for over twenty years. He was also an accomplished violinist. Clemens and Downing wrote one another from time to time after they left the River.

 

Fulton, Robert (no dates available).
Fulton was involved in Republican politics and served as a Nevada delegate to the national convention in 1890. Apparently he was one of the organizers for some sort of pioneers' reunion to be held in California.

 

Gilder, Jeannette (1849-1916).
Gilder was an editor and critic and the sister of Richard Watson Gilder, the editor of
Century Magazine.
Among other books, she coedited
Authors at Home: Personal and Biographical Sketches of Well-known American Writers,
which included a section on Twain.

 

Howells, William Dean (1837-1920).
Prolific novelist and influential critic, Howells was the chief sponsor of the literary school known as American realism. He was the editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
for some fifteen years before moving from Boston to New York, where he began writing “The Editor's Study” columns for
Harper's Monthly Magazine.
From the time Howells and Clemens first met in 1869 until the latter's death in 1910, they were the closest of friends and maintained a more or less constant correspondence during those forty years. Howells had favorably reviewed many of Twain's books, urged him to write for the
Atlantic,
read his manuscripts, and otherwise helped and promoted Twain's career. After Twain's death, Howells published an affectionate and astute memoir of the man,
My Mark Twain
(1910).

 

Lang, Andrew (1844-1912).
An influential English literary critic and respected man of letters, Lang shared with Twain an interest in Joan of Arc and other subjects. He published “The Art of Mark Twain” in the
Illustrated London News
and was otherwise helpful in promoting Twain's reputation abroad.

 

Moffett, Pamela Clemens (1827-1904).
The only surviving daughter of the Clemens family, she was widowed in 1865. She shared a home with her mother in St. Louis, and later in Fredonia, New York.

 

Nichols, Frank (no dates available).
Nichols was only the titular recipient of this letter. As Secretary of the Concord, Massachusetts, Free Trade Club, he had informed Twain that this club had just made the writer an honorary member. The timing was deliberate, for the Concord public library had just recently banned
Huckleberry Finn
and the gesture was meant as something of a counterstatement to that decision. Clemens's letter was intended to be made public, and it was released to the press soon after it was sent.

 

Picard, Helene (no dates available).
Clemens apparently never met this young woman, but he “elected” her as the French representative of his “Aquarium Club,” a club of his own making composed entirely of young girls he called “Angelfish.” Nineteen letters from Twain to Picard are extant.

 

Twichell, Joseph H. (1838-1918).
After W. D. Howells, probably Clemens's closest friend. He was a pastor of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford, Connecticut, which the Clemens family attended regularly. Twichell had an earthy sense of humor and appreciated much, if not all, of Clemens's comedy and at least tolerated Clemens's supposed irreverence. Twichell was the model for the character “Harris” in
A Tramp Abroad.

 

A novel of immeasurable richness, filled with adventures, ironies, and wonderfully drawn characters, all conveyed with Twain's mastery of humor and language,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
is often regarded as the masterpiece of American literature.
ISBN 0-14-243717-4

 

Evoking life in a small Mississippi River town,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
is Twain's hymn to the secure and fantastic world of boyhood and adventure.
ISBN 0-14-039083-9

 

This imaginary confrontation of a nineteenth-century American with life in sixth-century England is both a rich, extravagant comedy and an apocalyptic vision of terrifying violence and destruction.
ISBN 0-14-043064-4

 

These irreverent writings on travel in Europe are a burlesque of the sentimental travel books popular in the mid-nineteenth century and launched Twain's career. Bringing his fresh and humorous perspective to bear on hallowed European landmarks, Twain ultimately concludes that, for better or worse, “human nature is very much the same all over the world.”

Twain's firsthand portrait of the steamboat age and the science of riverboat piloting recalls the history of the Mississippi River, from its discovery by Europeans to the writer's own time.
ISBN 0-14-039050-2

 

This 1881 novel about a poor boy, Tom Canty, who exchanges identities with Edward Tudor, the prince of England, is at once an adventure story, a fantasy of timeless appeal, and an intriguing example of the author's abiding preoccupation with separating the true from the false, the genuine from the imposter. Included is the story “A Boy's Adventure,” written as part of the novel but published separately.
ISBN 0-14-043669-3

While it retains the comic exuberance of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
, this is Twain's darker and more disturbing account of human nature under slavery.
ISBN 0-14-043040-7

 

A fascinating picture of the American frontier emerges from Twain's fictionalized recollections of his experiences prospecting for gold, speculating in timber, and writing for a succession of small Western newspapers during the 1860s.
ISBN 0-14-039010-3

 

Masterful short fiction and prose pieces display the variety of Twain's imaginative invention, his diverse talents, and his extraordinary emotional range. The volume includes “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyberg,” “Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses,” and the spectacularly scatological “Date, 1601.”
ISBN 0-14-043417-8

 

Cast in the form of a walking tour through Germany, Switzerland, France, and Italy,
A Tramp Abroad
sparkles with the author's shrewd observations and highly opinionated comments on Old World culture, and showcases his unparalleled ability to integrate humorous sketches, autobiographical tidbits, and historical anecdotes in consistently entertaining narrative.

 

The Gilded Age
with Charles Dudley Warner

With his characteristic wit and perception, Mark Twain and his collaborator, Charles Dudley Warner, attack the greed, lust, and naïveté of their own time in a work that endures as one of America's most important satirical novels.