Mark Twain was just one of several pen names used by Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He was born November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. Samuel was the sixth of seven children. When Samuel was four years old, his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, the town that eventually became Mark Twain's inspiration for the town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Anyone who really knows me, knows how much I love Mark Twain. In his time he was a fantastic writer that was able to use his childhood memories, add a bit of imagination and write some really fantastic and entertaining novels. He also wrote his own autobiography, but made arrangements to insure that it would not be duplicated or released until 100 years after his death. Well, this April will be year 100. I first heard about the autobiography when I was in high school and I remember thinking, How clever of him to make everybody anticipate such a thing. As the years went on, I worried it might just be a rumor. Well it’s not! His original manuscript which has been locked up at the University of Berkley is now being prepared for release next spring. I can not wait to read the perspective Samuel Clemens had of his own life.
I have to be honest though, Twains novels are not my favorite reads but his heart is clearly visible in every one and that is why most people enjoy them so much. In the preface of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain writes “part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves” To me that means he hoped that adult readers would read the story and take a journey back in time and remember what is was like to be a child. By doing so they might appreciate the fact that the children around them are experiencing the same things that they once did. Adults sometimes lose patients with rowdy or overly imaginative children. I think Twain just wanted to help those adults remember that they were once rowdy and overly imaginative children themselves. I believe Mark Twain wrote from a place in his heart that really just wanted others to go on a nostalgic adventure. What a great gift to be able to give.
We also have Twain to thank for that phrase we all hear “Mind your p’s and q’s” When Twain lived in Missouri he worked as a newspaper editor. One of his duties was to put the letters that were to make all the words on the page in sentence form backwards. Twain once wrote in a news article about the two letters in the English alphabet that were mirror images of themselves. He said, "no mater how hard he tried he could never mind his p's and q's". He wrote that when he did his job he had to make sure that if he choose a q it was really a p and not a q but when printed it was backward so if it was a p it was really a q and vise versa. The redundancy was ultimately the reason he left editing. Now there are many different stories as to how this saying came about but this article dated January of 1862 was the earliest documentation of it.
In Twain's later years he wrote less, but his gift giving continued. He began giving motivational speeches in public forums. His satiric humor and wise words quickly made him a celebrity and profoundly affected later American writers such as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, both of whom have mentioned Twain as an inspiration for their own writing. His humorous nature and poetic writing set him apart from all other writers of his time and also greatly inspires me. The entertainment and whole hearted good feeling I feel when reading his work is something that I hope to pass on to others someday.
Some of my favorite Mark Twain Quotes are:
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” ~
Mark Twain
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“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.” ~
Mark Twain
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“A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.”
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Mark Twain
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“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
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Mark Twain
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“Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”
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Mark Twain
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“Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”
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Mark Twain
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