Willard Sterne Randall - How Cool Is Mark Twain?

Attempting to keep up with his schooling
as much as his part-time jobs allowed, Sam
somehow found time to read books for
pleasure. His favorites included stories of

knights and medieval adventures, the kind Sir Walter
Scott was then making popular. Young Clemens, how
ever, broadened his idea of heroes, going beyond the up
holders of monarchy to devour books about pirates, too.

The same year that Sam lost his father he acquired a
legacy of odd experiences that settled deep in his imag
ination, only to surface as he aged and staying with
him well into manhood. At least one such adventure
greatly resembled the romantic stories he liked to read.

Sams father had died in March, the cruel time of year

when pneumonia often claimed victims
who had survived winter. The Clemens
family kept going, thanks to the efforts
of all its members. Orion, the oldest son

(the family pronounced his name with the accent
on the first syllable), worked in St. Louis, while his
widowed mother took in paying mealtime guests and
Sam accepted any odd job local business owners gave
him, whether it was the grocer, the blacksmith, or the
bookstore owner.

Late in that summer of 1847, while Sam was swimming
with other youngsters in the Mississippi, he watched
as a boy he knew drowned. Just days later, fishing with
friends, they had made a gruesome discovery - the
corpse of an escaped slave. Horrified, they learned that
the older brother of Tom Blankenship, a friend of Cle
mens, was not so surprised as the others. The brother
had known where the fleeing slave was hiding and had
been bringing food to the runaway.

Nearly thirty years later in 1876, when Mark Twain
started to work on Huckleberry Finn, that haunting
memory surfaced. Readers of that book would meet
Jim, the escaped slave, but not until 1884 when Twain
started to publish excerpts of the book in Century
Magazine .

In 1847, a boy without a father, the only work Sam
could find was the kind that he didnt consider worth
while, because it didnt seem to be enriching him. Yet
he was acquiring invaluable experience that would

later enrich his own writing,

and, as it turned out, the

work of American writers

who came after him. Ernest

Hemingway spoke for most

of his contemporaries com

ing after Twain when he

said, All modern American

literature comes from

one book by Mark Twain

called Huckleberry Finn.

As part of a fatherless family, Clemens was learning
how it felt to be an outsider - not like boys in other
families. And long before he ever left home, he had
become adept at spotting outsiders, a position on the
edge of things that was beginning to feel familiar. Not
quite fitting in with other boys in town or with other
groups either, Clemens was learning to enjoy watching
the people who did fit. The young, alert, and hurting
outsider would keep at it, refining his way of watching

and his knack for thinking about what he saw in a way
that no insider could.

Not by intention, Clemens repeatedly found work that
put him in close proximity to writing in various forms.
Working first as a printer on a newspaper in Hannibal,
where his brother was editor, he learned about setting
type. In almost no time, he also discovered that he
needed more work than what his brother Orion could
offer. Clemens expected his brother to pay him, as
promised, but he never did see the weekly $3.50 he
was counting on. Instead, his observations and en
counters turned out to be worth far more.