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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how

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Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.

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Speaker 1: I'm Katie Lambert and joining me today is Sarah Dowdy.

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Speaker 1: How are you, Sarah? I'm well, how are you, Katie good.

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Speaker 1: I'm going to start you off with a quote today

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Speaker 1: by a very famous man, and you can guess who

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Speaker 1: it is. Okay, man is a marvelous curiosity. When he's

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Speaker 1: at his very very best, he is a sort of

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Speaker 1: low grade nickel plated angel. At his worst, he's unspeakable, unimaginable,

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Speaker 1: and first and last and all the time, he's a sarcasm.

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Speaker 1: I'm gonna hazard. That was Mark Twain Bingo. So today

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Speaker 1: we're talking about Mark Twain, mr. Literary genius, and we'll

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Speaker 1: start with his childhood as we do. Samuel Langhorne Clemens

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Speaker 1: was born in Florida, Missouri, in eighteen thirty five. UM.

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Speaker 1: He was premature and pretty thickly for the first ten

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Speaker 1: years of his life, which contributed a lot to how

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Speaker 1: his personality developed. He had to stay inside with his mother,

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Speaker 1: so he was kind of coddled, but he liked to

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Speaker 1: rebel with little acts of mischief, and you know, it

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Speaker 1: was a sweet, good natured kid though. Um. And he

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Speaker 1: also had a lot of remedies that his mother would

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Speaker 1: try to, you know, perform on him, which might have

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Speaker 1: added to kind of some quackery. The guinea pig child

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Speaker 1: happened later in life. He was one of seven kids.

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Speaker 1: I think he was number six of the seven um Orion, Pamela, Pleasant, Margaret, Benjamin,

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Speaker 1: and Henry. And only three of them I believe lived

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Speaker 1: out of childhood, and obviously Samuel was one of them.

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Speaker 1: His parents had a courteous but not a warm may

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Speaker 1: Ridge he has said, yeah, and um. When he was

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Speaker 1: a few years old, Uh, the family's fortunes kind of

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Speaker 1: started to change and they were forced to move to Hannibal, Missouri,

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Speaker 1: on the Mississippi River. Um. And another thing he would

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Speaker 1: talk about is he you know, he was kind of poor,

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Speaker 1: but the family had this unsettling belief that they would

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Speaker 1: come into money. His father owned some property in Tennessee,

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Speaker 1: which I'm not sure why, but he believed that would

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Speaker 1: be his fortune in the end. And he he later

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Speaker 1: said that it's a fine thing to grow up rich.

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Speaker 1: It's a fine thing to grow up poor, that's wholesome,

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Speaker 1: But to grow up perspectively, rich is not a healthy state. Well,

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Speaker 1: and kind of in between the two, even having the

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Speaker 1: prospect of it behind you and also in front of you. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: it may not give you the most healthy attitude toward money, which,

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Speaker 1: as we'll see later, definitely affected him. Yeah, but Hannibal

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Speaker 1: was a nice place for a kid to grow up

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Speaker 1: for a lot of ways. It had a lot of

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Speaker 1: fun outdoor pursuits, and some of his favorite boyhood sites

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Speaker 1: like Glasgow's Island and McDowell's Cave later appear in his writing. Um,

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Speaker 1: and as a boy he also read a lot James Fenimore, Cooper,

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Speaker 1: Sir Walter Scott. He played Robin Hood and pirates with

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Speaker 1: his friends. Um, but it wasn't all super picturesque. So

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Speaker 1: you're telling me some gruesome stories this morning and looking

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Speaker 1: over your notes, and it's it's a little disturbing. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: he uh. You know, Hannibal was sometimes a rather violent town,

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Speaker 1: and just in his childhood he found a corpse in

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Speaker 1: his father's office. We should say his father was a

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Speaker 1: justice of the peace, so not quite as bad as

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Speaker 1: it sounds. But he saw a man who was shot

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Speaker 1: to die in the street. He watched a friend drowned

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Speaker 1: and he found a few days after that, he found

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Speaker 1: a drowned and mutilated body of a fugitive slave. So

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Speaker 1: that all sounds like a pretty traumatic childhood, but maybe

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Speaker 1: it's par for the chorus for a boundary state. At

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Speaker 1: the time, I don't know. And I had read a

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Speaker 1: story about his family owned a slave, Jenny, who acted

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Speaker 1: as their nursemaid, and he saw her brutally whipped when

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Speaker 1: he was about six after a little altercation with his mother.

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Speaker 1: So the slavery stuff will figure in his works as well. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and he was also influenced. During his summers, he'd go

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Speaker 1: back to Florida, Missouri to stay with his uncle, and

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Speaker 1: he and his cousins would be told tales by a

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Speaker 1: slave called Uncle Daniel, who ended up being in part

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Speaker 1: a model for Jim in Huckleberry Finn. And another little

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Speaker 1: fact I like about his childhood was that he was

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Speaker 1: a sleepwalker. One night, when he was sleepwalking, he apparently

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Speaker 1: went to sister's room and picked up the edge of

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Speaker 1: her covers, which was supposed to be superstitiously a sign

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Speaker 1: that someone was going to die, and she did die

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Speaker 1: the next day, which led everyone in his family to

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Speaker 1: think that he had the second sight, and that was

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Speaker 1: another thing that stayed with him, that idea of paranormal activity.

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Speaker 1: And he was interested in science and invention. You know,

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Speaker 1: it seems later in life too, he takes responsibility for

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Speaker 1: death that clearly are not I wonder if that it

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Speaker 1: started way back then. But like most you know, young

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Speaker 1: boys at the time, he takes an apprenticeship and works

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Speaker 1: for a printer. And one story I really enjoy about

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Speaker 1: his apprenticeship that he tells in his autobiography, which I

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Speaker 1: would highly recommend. I've read the Charles Needer version, although

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Speaker 1: there are a few of them out there. Um. But

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Speaker 1: when he was working as a printer's apprentice to make

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Speaker 1: something fit a sermon, they put j C in for

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Speaker 1: Jesus Christ. And you know, obviously the printer thought that

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Speaker 1: was disrespectful and told them they had better put the

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Speaker 1: full name every single time they would not be abbreviating it.

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Speaker 1: And so, just to be a jerk, he put Jesus H.

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Speaker 1: Christ and all in all instances and gotten quite a

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Speaker 1: bit of trouble. But you know, his his printing career

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Speaker 1: kind of got off to a start maybe after that

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Speaker 1: despite that. Uh, and he was fortunate enough to have

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Speaker 1: an older brother who was already established in printing and publishing. Um.

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Speaker 1: He his brother Orion bought the Hannibal Journal, and uh,

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Speaker 1: Samuel contributed sketches and articles as well as you know,

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Speaker 1: doing type studying and printing work. And isn't that I

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Speaker 1: think that's the first time he used a pseudonym. It

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Speaker 1: is and his first pseudonym. This might be mangled here,

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Speaker 1: but w et the note. Nanda's justice Perkins. We've had

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Speaker 1: a lot of troubles with their names because the entire

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Speaker 1: time we thought Orion was a Ryan and Pamela was Pamela.

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Speaker 1: We were wrong. His mother liked different um, she liked

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Speaker 1: different lats definitely, So, Sarah, as you have said, Mark

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Speaker 1: Twain had entirely too many jobs for you to remember.

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Speaker 1: So he went on from this newspaper job and started

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Speaker 1: working at printing shops and was also writing, and then

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Speaker 1: he went to South America. He was planning to go

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Speaker 1: to South America. Sounds like kind of a crazy scheme,

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Speaker 1: but he was going to take a steamboat in eighteen

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Speaker 1: fifty seven to New Orleans and then from there going

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Speaker 1: to South America. But he never made it because he

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Speaker 1: was so fascinated by the steamboat, got talking to the

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Speaker 1: captain and persuaded the captain to take him on as

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Speaker 1: a steamboat pilot apprentice, which ended up being one of

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Speaker 1: his favorite jobs. He absolutely loved it. The freedom and um,

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Speaker 1: technical skill and discipline that came with being a pilot. Well,

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Speaker 1: and if you got your pilot license, I think you were.

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Speaker 1: It was a pretty lucrative job. Although it was it

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Speaker 1: was tough. You had to know all the different depths

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Speaker 1: and marks and everything of the river, which was not easy.

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Speaker 1: This is also when he first hears the name Mark Twain.

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Speaker 1: He lampoons a senior pilot, Isaiah Sellars, who had published

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Speaker 1: some very short, to the point observations of life on

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Speaker 1: the Mississippi and weather and very straightforward things. Uh. And

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Speaker 1: even though Clemens kind of mocked him, he really liked

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Speaker 1: this guy's pen name, and so he kept it. He

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Speaker 1: did his own to his credit, when he started using

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Speaker 1: the pen name Mark Twain, he thought that Isaiah Sellers

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Speaker 1: was dead. Not true, because somebody stole your pen name.

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Speaker 1: Don't steal mine, Sarah. He had to leave steamboat piloting.

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Speaker 1: I think you and I had found different things. I

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Speaker 1: found that it was because um, the war was breaking

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Speaker 1: out and the business was drying up, and I think

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Speaker 1: you found something. I heard that he was a little

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Speaker 1: worried he'd be impressed as a Union gunboat pilot, which

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Speaker 1: and at some point I think he was part of

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Speaker 1: a Confederate unit, so I don't think he would have

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Speaker 1: enjoyed that well. His his allegiance during the Civil War

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Speaker 1: is a little questionable, though he has his older brother

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Speaker 1: Orion was actually a really strong Lincoln supporter, so I guess,

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Speaker 1: like any um border state like that, he kind of

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Speaker 1: cane in the middle. He quit the Marian Rangers, which

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Speaker 1: was the volunteer Confederate unit, after two weeks, so apparently

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Speaker 1: wasn't not dedicated to At this point point, he took

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Speaker 1: yet another job and decided that he would go mind

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Speaker 1: some silver. Who would really like to see Mark Twain's resume.

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Speaker 1: I think there would be some gaps and there It

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Speaker 1: might be hard to explain, but he wasn't a very

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Speaker 1: good miner at all. And he also started investing in

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Speaker 1: timber and silver and gold stocks at this point. And

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Speaker 1: you know, we talked about his father's belief in prospecting. Uh.

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Speaker 1: Mark Twain was also or Clemens, still at this point

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Speaker 1: was not a good businessman, but part of this experience

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Speaker 1: when he was mining um went into his book roughing it,

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Speaker 1: so it was good for his literary career, if not

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Speaker 1: for his pocketbook. And during this time he also starts

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Speaker 1: writing letters to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise which are

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Speaker 1: so impressive they catch the attention of the editor who

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Speaker 1: offers him a job as a reporter. He takes on

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Speaker 1: his third apprenticeship in life Um and starts to be

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Speaker 1: a journalist and people started to know Mark Twain's name

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Speaker 1: in eighteen sixty five when he published a short story

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Speaker 1: called Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog, which got picked

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Speaker 1: up by papers all across the country and people loved it. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: it was a story he learned while mining. Actually, so

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Speaker 1: his varied work experience influenced his writings lucrative in a

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Speaker 1: different way. And he got hired at a different paper

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Speaker 1: and started a sort of travel writing career which again

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Speaker 1: ended up being very lucrative for him, and he was

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Speaker 1: able to publish the account later as Innocence Abroad in

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Speaker 1: eighteen sixty nine, and that was also his traveling during

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Speaker 1: that time also had another important effect in that he

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Speaker 1: met Olivia Langdon, who would become his wife. And I

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Speaker 1: am kind of obsessed with her, as was he, so

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Speaker 1: I'm really excited about this. She was the daughter of

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Speaker 1: a wealthy cole merchant. Their family was very progressive, they

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Speaker 1: were abolitionists, and he once referred to her as my faithful,

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Speaker 1: judicious and painstaking editor. He was very very much in

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Speaker 1: love with her his whole life, and Sarah and I

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Speaker 1: found a bunch of letters between him and his wife

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Speaker 1: on Mark Twain project dot org, where you can go

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Speaker 1: read and say all the sweet things to each other.

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Speaker 1: He makes his first attempt at a novel in eighteen

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Speaker 1: seventy three. The Gilded Age and Tom Sawyer came out

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Speaker 1: in eighteen seventy six, which has not ever gone out

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Speaker 1: of print. It's an extremely popular book still today. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and Clemmens was actually so taken by the character Huck

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Speaker 1: Finn and Tom Sawyer that he decided that Huck needed

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Speaker 1: his own narrative and started to write Huck Finn's autobiography

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Speaker 1: the same summer that Tom Sawyer was published, and decided

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Speaker 1: pretty quickly too, that it needed to be written in

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Speaker 1: Huck's own dialect, and he worked on Huck Finn, which

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Speaker 1: I think most people would consider his masterpiece. He worked

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Speaker 1: on it for years and years and would take on

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Speaker 1: other projects, and he didn't actually publish it until and

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Speaker 1: Ernest Hemingway said of Huck Finn, all modern American literature

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Speaker 1: comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn

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Speaker 1: and then goes on to say there was nothing before,

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Speaker 1: there has been nothing good since. So those are pretty

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Speaker 1: high accolades for a book. And also, like this man,

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Speaker 1: Hal Holbrook, who starred in a one man stage show

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Speaker 1: of Mark Twain, so you know, he obviously had a

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Speaker 1: pretty intimate understanding of Mark Twain playing him for years,

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Speaker 1: wrote that he made American speech something to be admired.

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Speaker 1: And I think that's a really good point. If you

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Speaker 1: haven't read Hook Finn, I would recommend that you do so,

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Speaker 1: but of course I'm an English major, so I would.

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Speaker 1: But the dialect is really interesting to read, and you

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Speaker 1: you do, it does something to the book because you

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Speaker 1: couldn't have gotten other It's not trying to be like

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Speaker 1: anything else. No, and it really did seem like the

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Speaker 1: first thing that it was so just truly through and

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Speaker 1: through truly American. So he moves to Europe for a

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Speaker 1: while and publishes him more books, A Tramp Abroad and

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Speaker 1: The Prince and the Pauper among them. And he also

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Speaker 1: travels at the Mississippi and starts taking notes for Life

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Speaker 1: on the Mississippi, talking about Mississippi's um. But he also

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Speaker 1: starts making pretty bad investments at this point, even more

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Speaker 1: bad investments, especially his support for James Page, who was

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Speaker 1: working on an automatic type setting machine. This is the

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Speaker 1: worst thing ever he committed over the years. He committed

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Speaker 1: like a couple to two hundred thousand dollars fortune between

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Speaker 1: eighteen eighty and eighteen ninety four to this machine. There's

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Speaker 1: um there. It actually is one in the Mark Twain

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Speaker 1: House Museum, but they're afraid to ever take it apart

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Speaker 1: because no one might be able to put it back

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Speaker 1: together again because it was notoriously finicky. And he was

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Speaker 1: riding so high. At this point he has a successful

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Speaker 1: biography of Ulysses Grant, and he writes Connecticut Yankee and

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Speaker 1: King Arthur's Court. Um. He actually thinks that that's going

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Speaker 1: to be his quote swan song to literature, because he

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Speaker 1: thinks his investments are all about to really, you know,

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Speaker 1: start bringing in the big money. He thought this machine,

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Speaker 1: he's quoted saying he thought it would be bigger than

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Speaker 1: the train, the telephone, or the cotton gin. And it

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Speaker 1: turned out that the Lena type machine came out and

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Speaker 1: made it immediately. Yeah. So uh, Clemmens goes into huge

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Speaker 1: debt manages to transfer the rights of his literature to

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Speaker 1: his wife, Happy rights to Livy, which I think he

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Speaker 1: originally didn't want to do. He thought he would just

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Speaker 1: sell those and get them out of debt. And she

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Speaker 1: was the one who kept trying to convince him not to,

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Speaker 1: saying that was their investment in the copyrights, and of

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Speaker 1: course she was right, So he transferred his money to

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Speaker 1: her and declared personal bankruptcy in eighteen ninety four. He

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Speaker 1: was really bad with money. He kept investing with all

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Speaker 1: the wrong people and just spending it in ways that

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Speaker 1: don't make sense from a business perspective. And so since

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Speaker 1: it's forced to keep working, he starts to think more

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Speaker 1: about his legacy and tries to cultivate a serious tone,

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Speaker 1: but can't. He can't. By this point, he can't get

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Speaker 1: away from the Mark Twain humorous persona right, that's how

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Speaker 1: what people wanted him to be. When they saw him,

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Speaker 1: and when they read him, they wanted him to be funny.

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Speaker 1: And a lot of tragedies start happening at this point

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Speaker 1: in his life too. In his daughter Susie dies of

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Speaker 1: spinal meningitis. She was only twenty four, I think, and

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Speaker 1: it was absolutely heartbreaking for both him and for Livy,

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Speaker 1: and they'd said they never got over it. They had

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Speaker 1: three daughters, and you know, despite despite him being away

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Speaker 1: traveling a lot, he was very attached to them, extremely

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Speaker 1: attached to all the women in his life. Actually he

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Speaker 1: had also they had had a young son named Langdon,

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Speaker 1: who died I think when he was only nineteen months

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Speaker 1: old of ditheria. So this wasn't the first sad thing

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Speaker 1: to happen to their family. Um. But soon after Susie died,

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Speaker 1: his another daughter, Jean, was diagnosed with epilepsy UM and

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Speaker 1: the family spent a lot of time and money traveling

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Speaker 1: to different doctors looking for a cure for her, which

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Speaker 1: they didn't find. UM. But to offset some of the

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Speaker 1: sad stuff, I found a list of books they had

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Speaker 1: in their library that their family enjoyed reading, which made

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Speaker 1: me happy. Through the looking glass, Uncle Remus Robin Hood,

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Speaker 1: Little Lord Fauntleroy, which Sarah said she didn't know it

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Speaker 1: was an actual book. I thought it was an outfit

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Speaker 1: Uncle Tom's cabin, and the whole family liked reading to

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Speaker 1: other Um Cole Ridge, Kipling, Shelley Tennyson, and longfellow Um

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Speaker 1: Livy really liked Jane Austen, but Mark Twain was having

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Speaker 1: none out of it. He really didn't like her. Um

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Speaker 1: and he starts to, you know, sort of put his

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Speaker 1: finances back in order at this point, mostly thanks to

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Speaker 1: the help of Henry Huddleson Rogers, who was a standard

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Speaker 1: oil man who helped him invest and also start building

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Speaker 1: up this reputation as a moral character that we we

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Speaker 1: associate with him now, somebody who you can go to

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Speaker 1: for these quotes that might be a little colorful or funny,

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Speaker 1: but they they kind of take a real strict moral

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Speaker 1: stand on something. Well, yeah, a lot of them start

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Speaker 1: to get very political after certain points, really anti imperialist,

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Speaker 1: and I think he was vice president of the Anti

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Speaker 1: Imperialist Society for a long time time. And he was

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Speaker 1: also against anti Semitism and slavery and was very vocal.

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Speaker 1: He was he was extremely vocal about the Belgian rule

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Speaker 1: in Congo. Actually he wrote up an essay regarding King

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Speaker 1: Leopold and Congo that was so intense that it wasn't

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Speaker 1: published anywhere, and he got in trouble for some of

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Speaker 1: these stances. He gave a really I guess sarcastic introduction

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Speaker 1: of Winston Churchill once and people were scandalized because a

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Speaker 1: lot of these essays are so hardline moral. A lot

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Speaker 1: of people called this period his bad mood of period,

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Speaker 1: which was a bit simplistic. I think that's not what

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Speaker 1: he was going for. Yeah, he was just trying to

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Speaker 1: shake off a little of the lightness of some of

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Speaker 1: his earlier work, and that that world lecture tour made

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Speaker 1: him rich again. It was grueling, but he did make

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Speaker 1: quite a bit of money on it, and actually, for

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Speaker 1: some people, I think became more famous for his speaking

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Speaker 1: than for his actual writing. And he pockets a few

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Speaker 1: honored degrees on the way too from Oxford. That was

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Speaker 1: his favorite one. He liked to wear the gown around

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Speaker 1: the place. He did. I think he wore one of

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Speaker 1: them in his daughter's wedding. Yeah, that might signal bad

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Speaker 1: turn for him. To wear your fancy, ornamental gown when

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Speaker 1: your daughter's in her wedding dress, I would say. But

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Speaker 1: in nineteen o four, Livvy dies in Italy. She's been

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Speaker 1: sick for a long time. She was an invalid and

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Speaker 1: again the love of his life. So this was huge

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Speaker 1: for him. In his autobiography he says, and I quote,

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Speaker 1: she was my life and she has gone. She was

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Speaker 1: my riches and I am a pauper. He was absolutely

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Speaker 1: devastated when she died. They've been staying in this sa

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Speaker 1: villa that he hated, and he kept thinking if he

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Speaker 1: got her somewhere else, you know, found the perfect palazzo

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Speaker 1: that she would be okay. And he found it and

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Speaker 1: went into her bedroom that night to tell her about

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Speaker 1: it and remembers her smiling, and then she died the

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Speaker 1: next morning. So he writes Eve's Diary for her, and

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Speaker 1: he tended to write poems or pieces of literature for

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Speaker 1: the women in his life as they started to die

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Speaker 1: up to memorialize them. And his daughter Jean died a

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Speaker 1: few years after that in n nine. I think connected

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Speaker 1: to her applette. She had a heart attack during an

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Speaker 1: epileptic seizure um and this sort of plunges him into

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Speaker 1: his last despair with you know, most of his family

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Speaker 1: is dead. By this point. He has one surviving daughter,

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Speaker 1: but she's left. She's left married and moved to Europe

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Speaker 1: um and so Clemens ends up going to Bermuda after

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Speaker 1: Jean has been buried, because through Muda with his biographer,

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Speaker 1: and his last writing was actually humorous, back to his

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Speaker 1: old style kind of uh called Etiquette for the Afterlife

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Speaker 1: advised pain. And one of the last things he wrote

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Speaker 1: um was death the only immortal who treats us all alike?

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Speaker 1: Whose pity and whose peace and whose revenger for all

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Speaker 1: the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor,

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Speaker 1: the loved and the unloved. And he writes in his

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Speaker 1: autobiography of being at the funeral of Gene and knowing

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Speaker 1: that he's going to die soon after that he was

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Speaker 1: pretty convinced that it wouldn't be long, and he did.

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Speaker 1: He did no more than four months afterwards. I think

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Speaker 1: my favorite quote about him is actually from Livy and

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Speaker 1: one of her letters, when she wrote, life is not

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Speaker 1: so interesting when you're away, because from everything we've learned,

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Speaker 1: it sounds like that's pretty spot on the Mark Twain.

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Speaker 1: So if you'd like to learn more about Mark Twain

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Speaker 1: and other literary great Please check out our website and

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Speaker 1: the Stuff you Missed to History blog at www dot

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Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. For more on this and

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Speaker 1: thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.

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