Twain Mark - Mark Twain the adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

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Mark Twain

The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

JEROME LOVING

Frontispiece: Mark Twain shirtless (at about the time of Huckleberry Finn). Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library.

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2010 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Loving, Jerome.

Mark Twain : the adventures of Samuel L. Clemens / Jerome Loving.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-25257-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Twain, Mark, 18351910. 2. Authors, American19th centuryBiography. 3. Humorists, American19th centuryBiography.

I. Title.

PS1331.L68 2010

818.409dc22

[B]

2009015366

Manufactured in the United States of America

19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy.

To Cathy, my Livy

Illustrations follow page 104.

As I wrote this biography, certain classics in criticism and biography continued to guide me in my studies of Mark Twain and his work. A few that come directly to mind are by Walter Blair, Van Wyck Brooks, Louis J. Budd, Bernard DeVoto, Justin Kaplan, Albert Bigelow Paine, and Henry Nash Smith, but there are many others, too many to name on a subject more researched and written about than any other figure in American literature. To name one, I owe a permanent debt to James M. Coxs Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (1966).

Without Robert H. Hirst, general editor, and the other editors, namely Victor Fischer and Lin Salamo, at the Mark Twain Project at the University of California at Berkeley, this biography would lack many of the insights born out of definitive editions of letters and texts, as well as the benefit derived from the Projects vast archival holdings. Bob Hirst was extremely helpful in going through my manuscript with his magnifying glass. Another Mark Twain expert who took a turn at my work is Alan Gribben; I thank him for the care with which he read a late draft and made useful suggestions. I would also like to thank Kevin Mac Donnell of Austin, Texas, currently the worlds leading Twain collector, for not only reading my biography but also providing many of its unique illustrations, including the dust jacket photo. I owe Kenneth M. Sanderson a favor for allowing me to consult his unpublished paper The Books of Charles L. Webster & Co. for appendix B. I am grateful to Neda Salem, office manager of the MTP, for her assistance and many courtesies during my several visits to that most important archive.

I owe a long-standing debt to my dear friend Ed Folsom, who has critiqued most of my work in manuscript over the last quarter of a century, including this biography. Another to thank in this regard is M. Jimmie Killingsworth, also a dear friend and colleague, currently head of the English Department at Texas A&M University, where I teach American literature. Louis J. Budd, the reigning dean of Mark Twain studies and my former professor at Duke University in the 1970s, read my manuscript and steadied my hand with regard to both facts and their application. My colleague William Bedford Clark, a poet and a specialist in southern American literature, was always generous with his insights about Mark Twain. I have also been fortunate to have professional advice from Bernard Beranek, Mary Boewe, Paul Christensen, Richard Hauer Costa, Carl Dawson, Susan Goodman, Ezra Greenspan, Cameron L. House, Donald R. House, Jr., David C. Loving, Patricia Loving, Philip McFarland, J. Lawrence Mitchell, Tom Quirk, Stephen Railton, Robert D. Richardson, Barb Schmidt, and Henry Sweets of the Mark Twain Museum in Hannibal. Gary Scharnhorst kindly shared with me the typescript of his now published