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Writing Career
While in the Nevada Territory, Sam resumed writing humorous sketches and travel letters and began using the pseudonym, Mark Twain, a term for water that is only two fathoms—twelve feet—deep. Twain continued to sign his more serious pieces as “S. L. Clemens,” but the farces, hoaxes, and satires that were to make him famous were now authored by “Mark Twain.” With the realization that he had an audience for his brand of bawdy humor, Twain began to travel extensively and write humorous travel letters for the San Francisco Alta California. The Alta California sponsored his steamship journey from New York to the Mediterranean, and the resulting travel letters increased his audience and admirers; Twain’s literary rise was under way.
Between 1864 and 1870, Twain contributed articles and travel letters to various newspapers and published Innocents Abroad (1869). After a long courtship, he married Olivia Langdon, daughter of Jervis Langdon, in 1870. Olivia proved to be a tempering influence on the often-moody Twain, and her family’s abolitionist views on slavery influenced Twain and his writings. As with Olivia’s father, Jervis, Twain eventually became friends with Frederick Douglass and supported the antislavery movement.
Because of the acclaim of Innocents Abroad, Twain gave up his career as a journalist-reporter and began concentrating on short stories and books. Using the method of parlaying his short story success into collections, Twain’s fame as a writer was immediate, and Innocents Abroad became a bestseller. The satire Twain used to expose the so-called sophistication of the Old World, in contrast to the old-fashioned American common sense, is similar to that found some ten years later in A Tramp Abroad (1880), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), when Hank Morgan confronts nobility and knighthood.
But it was the Mississippi River and the values of the people living along its shores that have made Twain one of America’s best and favorite storytellers. The humor that he found among the small one-horse towns, along with the culture of the Mississippi, has continued to fascinate readers and to embody an almost mythic sense of what it meant to be a young American in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
In 1876, Twain captured these elements in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Despite its contemporary reception, Tom Sawyer’s publication was overshadowed by the deaths of George Custer and his calvary at Little Big Horn. But the book’s popularity would grow throughout Twain’s lifetime, and by the time of his death, it was his best-selling novel. Twain’s most controversial work, however, was to come nine years later. In 1885, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published among much publicity and fanfare. Huck Finn ensured Twain’s place among the literary giants, and the work would prove to be Twain’s most studied and critically acclaimed novel.
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