Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Katie Lambert and joining me today is Sarah Dowdy.
Speaker 1: How are you, Sarah? I'm well, how are you, Katie good.
Speaker 1: I'm going to start you off with a quote today
Speaker 1: by a very famous man, and you can guess who
Speaker 1: it is. Okay, man is a marvelous curiosity. When he's
Speaker 1: at his very very best, he is a sort of
Speaker 1: low grade nickel plated angel. At his worst, he's unspeakable, unimaginable,
Speaker 1: and first and last and all the time, he's a sarcasm.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna hazard. That was Mark Twain Bingo. So today
Speaker 1: we're talking about Mark Twain, mr. Literary genius, and we'll
Speaker 1: start with his childhood as we do. Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Speaker 1: was born in Florida, Missouri, in eighteen thirty five. UM.
Speaker 1: He was premature and pretty thickly for the first ten
Speaker 1: years of his life, which contributed a lot to how
Speaker 1: his personality developed. He had to stay inside with his mother,
Speaker 1: so he was kind of coddled, but he liked to
Speaker 1: rebel with little acts of mischief, and you know, it
Speaker 1: was a sweet, good natured kid though. Um. And he
Speaker 1: also had a lot of remedies that his mother would
Speaker 1: try to, you know, perform on him, which might have
Speaker 1: added to kind of some quackery. The guinea pig child
Speaker 1: happened later in life. He was one of seven kids.
Speaker 1: I think he was number six of the seven um Orion, Pamela, Pleasant, Margaret, Benjamin,
Speaker 1: and Henry. And only three of them I believe lived
Speaker 1: out of childhood, and obviously Samuel was one of them.
Speaker 1: His parents had a courteous but not a warm may
Speaker 1: Ridge he has said, yeah, and um. When he was
Speaker 1: a few years old, Uh, the family's fortunes kind of
Speaker 1: started to change and they were forced to move to Hannibal, Missouri,
Speaker 1: on the Mississippi River. Um. And another thing he would
Speaker 1: talk about is he you know, he was kind of poor,
Speaker 1: but the family had this unsettling belief that they would
Speaker 1: come into money. His father owned some property in Tennessee,
Speaker 1: which I'm not sure why, but he believed that would
Speaker 1: be his fortune in the end. And he he later
Speaker 1: said that it's a fine thing to grow up rich.
Speaker 1: It's a fine thing to grow up poor, that's wholesome,
Speaker 1: But to grow up perspectively, rich is not a healthy state. Well,
Speaker 1: and kind of in between the two, even having the
Speaker 1: prospect of it behind you and also in front of you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it may not give you the most healthy attitude toward money, which,
Speaker 1: as we'll see later, definitely affected him. Yeah, but Hannibal
Speaker 1: was a nice place for a kid to grow up
Speaker 1: for a lot of ways. It had a lot of
Speaker 1: fun outdoor pursuits, and some of his favorite boyhood sites
Speaker 1: like Glasgow's Island and McDowell's Cave later appear in his writing. Um,
Speaker 1: and as a boy he also read a lot James Fenimore, Cooper,
Speaker 1: Sir Walter Scott. He played Robin Hood and pirates with
Speaker 1: his friends. Um, but it wasn't all super picturesque. So
Speaker 1: you're telling me some gruesome stories this morning and looking
Speaker 1: over your notes, and it's it's a little disturbing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he uh. You know, Hannibal was sometimes a rather violent town,
Speaker 1: and just in his childhood he found a corpse in
Speaker 1: his father's office. We should say his father was a
Speaker 1: justice of the peace, so not quite as bad as
Speaker 1: it sounds. But he saw a man who was shot
Speaker 1: to die in the street. He watched a friend drowned
Speaker 1: and he found a few days after that, he found
Speaker 1: a drowned and mutilated body of a fugitive slave. So
Speaker 1: that all sounds like a pretty traumatic childhood, but maybe
Speaker 1: it's par for the chorus for a boundary state. At
Speaker 1: the time, I don't know. And I had read a
Speaker 1: story about his family owned a slave, Jenny, who acted
Speaker 1: as their nursemaid, and he saw her brutally whipped when
Speaker 1: he was about six after a little altercation with his mother.
Speaker 1: So the slavery stuff will figure in his works as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he was also influenced. During his summers, he'd go
Speaker 1: back to Florida, Missouri to stay with his uncle, and
Speaker 1: he and his cousins would be told tales by a
Speaker 1: slave called Uncle Daniel, who ended up being in part
Speaker 1: a model for Jim in Huckleberry Finn. And another little
Speaker 1: fact I like about his childhood was that he was
Speaker 1: a sleepwalker. One night, when he was sleepwalking, he apparently
Speaker 1: went to sister's room and picked up the edge of
Speaker 1: her covers, which was supposed to be superstitiously a sign
Speaker 1: that someone was going to die, and she did die
Speaker 1: the next day, which led everyone in his family to
Speaker 1: think that he had the second sight, and that was
Speaker 1: another thing that stayed with him, that idea of paranormal activity.
Speaker 1: And he was interested in science and invention. You know,
Speaker 1: it seems later in life too, he takes responsibility for
Speaker 1: death that clearly are not I wonder if that it
Speaker 1: started way back then. But like most you know, young
Speaker 1: boys at the time, he takes an apprenticeship and works
Speaker 1: for a printer. And one story I really enjoy about
Speaker 1: his apprenticeship that he tells in his autobiography, which I
Speaker 1: would highly recommend. I've read the Charles Needer version, although
Speaker 1: there are a few of them out there. Um. But
Speaker 1: when he was working as a printer's apprentice to make
Speaker 1: something fit a sermon, they put j C in for
Speaker 1: Jesus Christ. And you know, obviously the printer thought that
Speaker 1: was disrespectful and told them they had better put the
Speaker 1: full name every single time they would not be abbreviating it.
Speaker 1: And so, just to be a jerk, he put Jesus H.
Speaker 1: Christ and all in all instances and gotten quite a
Speaker 1: bit of trouble. But you know, his his printing career
Speaker 1: kind of got off to a start maybe after that
Speaker 1: despite that. Uh, and he was fortunate enough to have
Speaker 1: an older brother who was already established in printing and publishing. Um.
Speaker 1: He his brother Orion bought the Hannibal Journal, and uh,
Speaker 1: Samuel contributed sketches and articles as well as you know,
Speaker 1: doing type studying and printing work. And isn't that I
Speaker 1: think that's the first time he used a pseudonym. It
Speaker 1: is and his first pseudonym. This might be mangled here,
Speaker 1: but w et the note. Nanda's justice Perkins. We've had
Speaker 1: a lot of troubles with their names because the entire
Speaker 1: time we thought Orion was a Ryan and Pamela was Pamela.
Speaker 1: We were wrong. His mother liked different um, she liked
Speaker 1: different lats definitely, So, Sarah, as you have said, Mark
Speaker 1: Twain had entirely too many jobs for you to remember.
Speaker 1: So he went on from this newspaper job and started
Speaker 1: working at printing shops and was also writing, and then
Speaker 1: he went to South America. He was planning to go
Speaker 1: to South America. Sounds like kind of a crazy scheme,
Speaker 1: but he was going to take a steamboat in eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty seven to New Orleans and then from there going
Speaker 1: to South America. But he never made it because he
Speaker 1: was so fascinated by the steamboat, got talking to the
Speaker 1: captain and persuaded the captain to take him on as
Speaker 1: a steamboat pilot apprentice, which ended up being one of
Speaker 1: his favorite jobs. He absolutely loved it. The freedom and um,
Speaker 1: technical skill and discipline that came with being a pilot. Well,
Speaker 1: and if you got your pilot license, I think you were.
Speaker 1: It was a pretty lucrative job. Although it was it
Speaker 1: was tough. You had to know all the different depths
Speaker 1: and marks and everything of the river, which was not easy.
Speaker 1: This is also when he first hears the name Mark Twain.
Speaker 1: He lampoons a senior pilot, Isaiah Sellars, who had published
Speaker 1: some very short, to the point observations of life on
Speaker 1: the Mississippi and weather and very straightforward things. Uh. And
Speaker 1: even though Clemens kind of mocked him, he really liked
Speaker 1: this guy's pen name, and so he kept it. He
Speaker 1: did his own to his credit, when he started using
Speaker 1: the pen name Mark Twain, he thought that Isaiah Sellers
Speaker 1: was dead. Not true, because somebody stole your pen name.
Speaker 1: Don't steal mine, Sarah. He had to leave steamboat piloting.
Speaker 1: I think you and I had found different things. I
Speaker 1: found that it was because um, the war was breaking
Speaker 1: out and the business was drying up, and I think
Speaker 1: you found something. I heard that he was a little
Speaker 1: worried he'd be impressed as a Union gunboat pilot, which
Speaker 1: and at some point I think he was part of
Speaker 1: a Confederate unit, so I don't think he would have
Speaker 1: enjoyed that well. His his allegiance during the Civil War
Speaker 1: is a little questionable, though he has his older brother
Speaker 1: Orion was actually a really strong Lincoln supporter, so I guess,
Speaker 1: like any um border state like that, he kind of
Speaker 1: cane in the middle. He quit the Marian Rangers, which
Speaker 1: was the volunteer Confederate unit, after two weeks, so apparently
Speaker 1: wasn't not dedicated to At this point point, he took
Speaker 1: yet another job and decided that he would go mind
Speaker 1: some silver. Who would really like to see Mark Twain's resume.
Speaker 1: I think there would be some gaps and there It
Speaker 1: might be hard to explain, but he wasn't a very
Speaker 1: good miner at all. And he also started investing in
Speaker 1: timber and silver and gold stocks at this point. And
Speaker 1: you know, we talked about his father's belief in prospecting. Uh.
Speaker 1: Mark Twain was also or Clemens, still at this point
Speaker 1: was not a good businessman, but part of this experience
Speaker 1: when he was mining um went into his book roughing it,
Speaker 1: so it was good for his literary career, if not
Speaker 1: for his pocketbook. And during this time he also starts
Speaker 1: writing letters to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise which are
Speaker 1: so impressive they catch the attention of the editor who
Speaker 1: offers him a job as a reporter. He takes on
Speaker 1: his third apprenticeship in life Um and starts to be
Speaker 1: a journalist and people started to know Mark Twain's name
Speaker 1: in eighteen sixty five when he published a short story
Speaker 1: called Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog, which got picked
Speaker 1: up by papers all across the country and people loved it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a story he learned while mining. Actually, so
Speaker 1: his varied work experience influenced his writings lucrative in a
Speaker 1: different way. And he got hired at a different paper
Speaker 1: and started a sort of travel writing career which again
Speaker 1: ended up being very lucrative for him, and he was
Speaker 1: able to publish the account later as Innocence Abroad in
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty nine, and that was also his traveling during
Speaker 1: that time also had another important effect in that he
Speaker 1: met Olivia Langdon, who would become his wife. And I
Speaker 1: am kind of obsessed with her, as was he, so
Speaker 1: I'm really excited about this. She was the daughter of
Speaker 1: a wealthy cole merchant. Their family was very progressive, they
Speaker 1: were abolitionists, and he once referred to her as my faithful,
Speaker 1: judicious and painstaking editor. He was very very much in
Speaker 1: love with her his whole life, and Sarah and I
Speaker 1: found a bunch of letters between him and his wife
Speaker 1: on Mark Twain project dot org, where you can go
Speaker 1: read and say all the sweet things to each other.
Speaker 1: He makes his first attempt at a novel in eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy three. The Gilded Age and Tom Sawyer came out
Speaker 1: in eighteen seventy six, which has not ever gone out
Speaker 1: of print. It's an extremely popular book still today. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and Clemmens was actually so taken by the character Huck
Speaker 1: Finn and Tom Sawyer that he decided that Huck needed
Speaker 1: his own narrative and started to write Huck Finn's autobiography
Speaker 1: the same summer that Tom Sawyer was published, and decided
Speaker 1: pretty quickly too, that it needed to be written in
Speaker 1: Huck's own dialect, and he worked on Huck Finn, which
Speaker 1: I think most people would consider his masterpiece. He worked
Speaker 1: on it for years and years and would take on
Speaker 1: other projects, and he didn't actually publish it until and
Speaker 1: Ernest Hemingway said of Huck Finn, all modern American literature
Speaker 1: comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn
Speaker 1: and then goes on to say there was nothing before,
Speaker 1: there has been nothing good since. So those are pretty
Speaker 1: high accolades for a book. And also, like this man,
Speaker 1: Hal Holbrook, who starred in a one man stage show
Speaker 1: of Mark Twain, so you know, he obviously had a
Speaker 1: pretty intimate understanding of Mark Twain playing him for years,
Speaker 1: wrote that he made American speech something to be admired.
Speaker 1: And I think that's a really good point. If you
Speaker 1: haven't read Hook Finn, I would recommend that you do so,
Speaker 1: but of course I'm an English major, so I would.
Speaker 1: But the dialect is really interesting to read, and you
Speaker 1: you do, it does something to the book because you
Speaker 1: couldn't have gotten other It's not trying to be like
Speaker 1: anything else. No, and it really did seem like the
Speaker 1: first thing that it was so just truly through and
Speaker 1: through truly American. So he moves to Europe for a
Speaker 1: while and publishes him more books, A Tramp Abroad and
Speaker 1: The Prince and the Pauper among them. And he also
Speaker 1: travels at the Mississippi and starts taking notes for Life
Speaker 1: on the Mississippi, talking about Mississippi's um. But he also
Speaker 1: starts making pretty bad investments at this point, even more
Speaker 1: bad investments, especially his support for James Page, who was
Speaker 1: working on an automatic type setting machine. This is the
Speaker 1: worst thing ever he committed over the years. He committed
Speaker 1: like a couple to two hundred thousand dollars fortune between
Speaker 1: eighteen eighty and eighteen ninety four to this machine. There's
Speaker 1: um there. It actually is one in the Mark Twain
Speaker 1: House Museum, but they're afraid to ever take it apart
Speaker 1: because no one might be able to put it back
Speaker 1: together again because it was notoriously finicky. And he was
Speaker 1: riding so high. At this point he has a successful
Speaker 1: biography of Ulysses Grant, and he writes Connecticut Yankee and
Speaker 1: King Arthur's Court. Um. He actually thinks that that's going
Speaker 1: to be his quote swan song to literature, because he
Speaker 1: thinks his investments are all about to really, you know,
Speaker 1: start bringing in the big money. He thought this machine,
Speaker 1: he's quoted saying he thought it would be bigger than
Speaker 1: the train, the telephone, or the cotton gin. And it
Speaker 1: turned out that the Lena type machine came out and
Speaker 1: made it immediately. Yeah. So uh, Clemmens goes into huge
Speaker 1: debt manages to transfer the rights of his literature to
Speaker 1: his wife, Happy rights to Livy, which I think he
Speaker 1: originally didn't want to do. He thought he would just
Speaker 1: sell those and get them out of debt. And she
Speaker 1: was the one who kept trying to convince him not to,
Speaker 1: saying that was their investment in the copyrights, and of
Speaker 1: course she was right, So he transferred his money to
Speaker 1: her and declared personal bankruptcy in eighteen ninety four. He
Speaker 1: was really bad with money. He kept investing with all
Speaker 1: the wrong people and just spending it in ways that
Speaker 1: don't make sense from a business perspective. And so since
Speaker 1: it's forced to keep working, he starts to think more
Speaker 1: about his legacy and tries to cultivate a serious tone,
Speaker 1: but can't. He can't. By this point, he can't get
Speaker 1: away from the Mark Twain humorous persona right, that's how
Speaker 1: what people wanted him to be. When they saw him,
Speaker 1: and when they read him, they wanted him to be funny.
Speaker 1: And a lot of tragedies start happening at this point
Speaker 1: in his life too. In his daughter Susie dies of
Speaker 1: spinal meningitis. She was only twenty four, I think, and
Speaker 1: it was absolutely heartbreaking for both him and for Livy,
Speaker 1: and they'd said they never got over it. They had
Speaker 1: three daughters, and you know, despite despite him being away
Speaker 1: traveling a lot, he was very attached to them, extremely
Speaker 1: attached to all the women in his life. Actually he
Speaker 1: had also they had had a young son named Langdon,
Speaker 1: who died I think when he was only nineteen months
Speaker 1: old of ditheria. So this wasn't the first sad thing
Speaker 1: to happen to their family. Um. But soon after Susie died,
Speaker 1: his another daughter, Jean, was diagnosed with epilepsy UM and
Speaker 1: the family spent a lot of time and money traveling
Speaker 1: to different doctors looking for a cure for her, which
Speaker 1: they didn't find. UM. But to offset some of the
Speaker 1: sad stuff, I found a list of books they had
Speaker 1: in their library that their family enjoyed reading, which made
Speaker 1: me happy. Through the looking glass, Uncle Remus Robin Hood,
Speaker 1: Little Lord Fauntleroy, which Sarah said she didn't know it
Speaker 1: was an actual book. I thought it was an outfit
Speaker 1: Uncle Tom's cabin, and the whole family liked reading to
Speaker 1: other Um Cole Ridge, Kipling, Shelley Tennyson, and longfellow Um
Speaker 1: Livy really liked Jane Austen, but Mark Twain was having
Speaker 1: none out of it. He really didn't like her. Um
Speaker 1: and he starts to, you know, sort of put his
Speaker 1: finances back in order at this point, mostly thanks to
Speaker 1: the help of Henry Huddleson Rogers, who was a standard
Speaker 1: oil man who helped him invest and also start building
Speaker 1: up this reputation as a moral character that we we
Speaker 1: associate with him now, somebody who you can go to
Speaker 1: for these quotes that might be a little colorful or funny,
Speaker 1: but they they kind of take a real strict moral
Speaker 1: stand on something. Well, yeah, a lot of them start
Speaker 1: to get very political after certain points, really anti imperialist,
Speaker 1: and I think he was vice president of the Anti
Speaker 1: Imperialist Society for a long time time. And he was
Speaker 1: also against anti Semitism and slavery and was very vocal.
Speaker 1: He was he was extremely vocal about the Belgian rule
Speaker 1: in Congo. Actually he wrote up an essay regarding King
Speaker 1: Leopold and Congo that was so intense that it wasn't
Speaker 1: published anywhere, and he got in trouble for some of
Speaker 1: these stances. He gave a really I guess sarcastic introduction
Speaker 1: of Winston Churchill once and people were scandalized because a
Speaker 1: lot of these essays are so hardline moral. A lot
Speaker 1: of people called this period his bad mood of period,
Speaker 1: which was a bit simplistic. I think that's not what
Speaker 1: he was going for. Yeah, he was just trying to
Speaker 1: shake off a little of the lightness of some of
Speaker 1: his earlier work, and that that world lecture tour made
Speaker 1: him rich again. It was grueling, but he did make
Speaker 1: quite a bit of money on it, and actually, for
Speaker 1: some people, I think became more famous for his speaking
Speaker 1: than for his actual writing. And he pockets a few
Speaker 1: honored degrees on the way too from Oxford. That was
Speaker 1: his favorite one. He liked to wear the gown around
Speaker 1: the place. He did. I think he wore one of
Speaker 1: them in his daughter's wedding. Yeah, that might signal bad
Speaker 1: turn for him. To wear your fancy, ornamental gown when
Speaker 1: your daughter's in her wedding dress, I would say. But
Speaker 1: in nineteen o four, Livvy dies in Italy. She's been
Speaker 1: sick for a long time. She was an invalid and
Speaker 1: again the love of his life. So this was huge
Speaker 1: for him. In his autobiography he says, and I quote,
Speaker 1: she was my life and she has gone. She was
Speaker 1: my riches and I am a pauper. He was absolutely
Speaker 1: devastated when she died. They've been staying in this sa
Speaker 1: villa that he hated, and he kept thinking if he
Speaker 1: got her somewhere else, you know, found the perfect palazzo
Speaker 1: that she would be okay. And he found it and
Speaker 1: went into her bedroom that night to tell her about
Speaker 1: it and remembers her smiling, and then she died the
Speaker 1: next morning. So he writes Eve's Diary for her, and
Speaker 1: he tended to write poems or pieces of literature for
Speaker 1: the women in his life as they started to die
Speaker 1: up to memorialize them. And his daughter Jean died a
Speaker 1: few years after that in n nine. I think connected
Speaker 1: to her applette. She had a heart attack during an
Speaker 1: epileptic seizure um and this sort of plunges him into
Speaker 1: his last despair with you know, most of his family
Speaker 1: is dead. By this point. He has one surviving daughter,
Speaker 1: but she's left. She's left married and moved to Europe
Speaker 1: um and so Clemens ends up going to Bermuda after
Speaker 1: Jean has been buried, because through Muda with his biographer,
Speaker 1: and his last writing was actually humorous, back to his
Speaker 1: old style kind of uh called Etiquette for the Afterlife
Speaker 1: advised pain. And one of the last things he wrote
Speaker 1: um was death the only immortal who treats us all alike?
Speaker 1: Whose pity and whose peace and whose revenger for all
Speaker 1: the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor,
Speaker 1: the loved and the unloved. And he writes in his
Speaker 1: autobiography of being at the funeral of Gene and knowing
Speaker 1: that he's going to die soon after that he was
Speaker 1: pretty convinced that it wouldn't be long, and he did.
Speaker 1: He did no more than four months afterwards. I think
Speaker 1: my favorite quote about him is actually from Livy and
Speaker 1: one of her letters, when she wrote, life is not
Speaker 1: so interesting when you're away, because from everything we've learned,
Speaker 1: it sounds like that's pretty spot on the Mark Twain.
Speaker 1: So if you'd like to learn more about Mark Twain
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