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Most Americans remember Mark
Twain as the father of Huck
Finn
’
s idyllic cruise
through eternal
boyhood
and
Tom
Sawyer
’
s
endless
summer
of
freedom
and
adventure.
Indeed,
this
nation
’
s
best-loved author was every bit as
adventurous, patriotic, romantic and humorous as
anyone has
ever
imagined.
I
found
another
Twain
as
well-
one
who
grew
cynical,
bitter,
saddened
by
the
profound personal tragedies life dealt
him, a man who became obsessed with the frailties
of the
human race, who saw clearly
ahead a black wall of night.
Tramp
printer,
river
pilot,
Confederate
guerrilla,
prospector
starry-eyed
optimist,
acid-tongued
cynic: The man who became Mark Twain was born
Samuel Langhorne Clemens and
he
ranged
across
the
nation
for
more
than
a
third
of
his
life,
digesting
the
new
American
experience before
sharing it with the world as writer and lecturer.
He adopted his pen name from
the
cry
heard
in
his
steamboat
days,
signaling
two
fathoms
of
water-
a
navigable
depth.
His
popularity
is
attested
by
the
fact
that
more
than
a
score
of
his
books
remain
in
print,
and
translations are still
read around the world.
The
geographic core, in Twain
’
s
early
years, was the great valley of
the
Mississippi River,
main
artery
of
transportation
in
the
young
nation
’
s
heart.
Keelboats,
flatboats,
and
large
rafts
carried the first major commerce.
Lumber, corn, tobacco, wheat, and furs moved
downstream to
the delta country; sugar,
molasses, cotton, and whiskey traveled north. In
the 1850
’
s, before the
climax of westward expansion, the vast
basin drained three-quarters of the settled United
States.
Young
Mark
Twain
entered
that
world
in
1857
as
a
cub
pilot
on
a
steamboat.
The
cast
of
characters
set
before
him
in
his
new
profession
was
rich
and
varied-a
cosmos.
He
participated
abundantly in
this life, listening to pilothouse talk of feuds,
piracies, lynchings, medicine shows,
and savage waterside slums. All would
resurface in his books, together with the colorful
language
that he soaked up with a
memory that seemed phonographic.
Steamboat
decks
teemed
not
only
with
the
main
current
of
pioneering
humanity,
but
its
flotsam
of
hustlers,
gamblers,
and
thugs
as
well.
From
them
all
Mark
Twain
gained
a
keen
perception
of
the
human
race,
of
the
difference
between
what
people
claim
steamboat
trade
marked
the
real
beginning
of
his
education,
and
the
most
lasting
part
of
it.
In
later
life
Twain
acknowledged that the
river had acquainted him with every possible type
of human nature. Those
acquaintanceships strengthened all his
writing, but he never wrote better than when he
wrote of
the people along the great
stream.
When
railroad
began
driving
up
the
demand
for
steamboat
pilots
and
the
Civil
War
halted
commerce,
Mark
Twain
left
the
river
country.
He
tried
soldiering
for
two
weeks
with
a
motley
band
enemy.
Twain
quit
after
deciding,
“…
I
knew
more
about
retreating
than
the
man
that
invented
retreating.
”
He
went
west
by
stagecoach
and
succumbed
to
the
epidemic
of
gold
and
silver
fever
in
Nevada
’
s
Washoe
region.
For
eight
months
he
flirted
with
the
colossal
wealth
available
to
the
lucky and
the persistent, and was rebuffed. Broke and
discouraged, he accepted a job as reporter
with the Virginia City Territorial
Enterprise, to literature
’
s
enduring gratitude.
From
the
discouragement
of
his
mining
failures,
Mark
Twain
began
digging
his
way
to
regional fame as a
newspaper reporter and in the reporting trade, but
for making money, his pen
would prove
mightier than his pickax. In the spring of 1864,
less than two years after joining the
Territorial
Enterprise,
he
boarded
the
stagecoach
for
San
Francisco,
then
and
now
a
hotbed
of
hopeful young writers.
Mark Twain honed and experimented with
his new writing muscles, but he had to leave the
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