Naughty children in Gafur Gulam’s and Mark Twain’s works Contents Introduction Chapter I. Uzbek and American literature and their impact to the world Literature

2.2. Mark Twain is a true father of American literature

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American humorist, satirist, lecture and writer. He was one of the foremost American Philosophers of his day and was the world’s most famous humorist of any day. During the later years of his life he ranked not only as America’s chief man of letters, but likewise as his best known and best loved citizen. He became a friend to presidents, artists, leading industrialists and European royalty. ¹⁰

Samuel Langhorne Clemens is most noted for his novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "the Great American Novel."
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri in November 30, 1835. He was the sixth child of John Marshall Clemens, who gave him the name of Samuel- a family name and added Langhorne, after an old Virginia friend of his father . The child was puny and did not make a very study fight for life. Still he weathered along, season after season, only three of his siblings survived childhood: his brother Orion and Henry and his sister Pamela. His sister Margaret died when Sam was four years old, and his brother Benjamin died three years later. Another brother Pleasant died and the age of six month.
Approximately four years after his birth, in 1839, the Clemens family moved to the small frontier town of Hannibal, Missouri. Agrowing port city that lie along the banks of the Mississippi. Missouri was a slave state in the Union. Sam’s father owned one slave and his uncle owned several. In fact, it was on his uncle’s farm that Sam spent many boyhood summers playing in the slave quarters, listening to tall tales and the slave spiritual that he would enjoy throughout his life. Later he described these themes in his writings. In Tom Sawyer we have a picture of the Hannibal of those days and the atmosphere of his boyhood there. At school to his own words, he “excelled only in spelling”. “When I was a boy there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was to be a steamboat men.¹¹
His schooling was brief and of a desultory kind. It ended when he was 12, his father died of pneumonia. Shortly there after he left school having completed the fifth grade, to work as a printer’s apprentice for a local newspaper. His job was to arrange the type for each of the newspaper stories, allowing Sam to read the news of the world while completing his work.
After two short years, he joined his brother Orion’s newspaper as a printer and editorial assistant. He also started his career as a journalist by writing for the Hannibal Journal as a rule of local characters and conditions usually published in his brother’s absence; generally resulting in trouble on his return. Yet they made the paper sell and if Orion had realized his brother’s talent he might have turned it into capital even then. In 1853, when he was almost eighteen, Clemens grew tired of his limitations and pined of the wider horizon of the world. He headed east to New York City and Philadelphia where he worked on several different newspapers and found some success at writing articles.
By 1857, he had returned home to embark on a new career as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River. With the Outbreak of the Civil war in 1861, however , all traffic along the river came to a halt, as did Sam’s pilot career, His famous pen name Twain adopted from the call- “Mark Twain!”. It was a river term which means two fathoms or 12feet when the dept of water for a boat is being sounded. “Mark Twain means a safe depth for a riverboat.”
Samuel Clemens was not the first to use the name “Mark Twain”. It originally belonged to an old, highly respected river pilot named Captain Isaiah Sellers.
The old gentlemen was not of literary turn or capacity but he used to jot dawn brief paragraphs of plain, practical information about the river and sign them “Mark Twain” and gave them to the stage and condition of the river, and were accurate and valuable and thus far, they contained no poison. But in speaking of the stage of the river to day, at a given point, the captain was pretty apt to drop in a little remark about his being the first time he had seen the water so sign or so law at that particular point for forty-nine years; and now and then he would mention Island so and so and follow it, in parentheses, with some such observation as “disappeared in 1807, if I remember rightly”. In these unique interjections lay poison and bitterness for the other old pilots and they used to chaff the “Mark Twain” paragraph with unsparing mockery.
It so chanced that one of these paragraphs became the text for my first newspaper article. I burlesqued it broadly very broadly, stringing my fantastic out to extent of eight hundred or a thousand words. I was a “cub” at the time. I showed my performance to some pilots and they eagerly rushed it into print in the “New Orleans True Delta”. It was a great pity, for it did nobody any worthy service, and it sent a pang deep into a good man’s heart. There was no malice in my rubbish; but it laughed at a man to whom such a thing was new and strange and dreadful. I did know then, though I do now, that there is no suffering comparable with that a private person fells when he is for the first time pilloried in print.
Captain Sellers did me the honor to profoundly detest me from that day forth. When I say he did me the honor, to profoundly, I am not using empty words. It was a very real honor to be in thoughts of so great a man as captain Sellers and I had wit enough to appreciate it and be proud it. It was distinction to be loved by such a man; but it was a much better greater distinction to be hated by him because he loved scores of people but he didn’t sit up nights to hate anybody but me”.1. “I liked the name and stole it” –once Clemens confessed to professor Wm. L. Phelps, “I think I have done him no wrong, for I seem to have made this name somewhat generally known.”
In 1862 Twain served briefly as a confederate irregular. The Civil War put an end to the steamboat traffic and during a period when Twain was out of work, he lived in a primitive cabin on Jackass Hill and tried his luck as a gold-miner. “I would have been more or less than human if I had not gone mad like the rest” he confessed.
Twain moved to Virginia City, where he edited two years Territorial Enterprise. On February 3, 1863, “Mark Twain” was born when he signed a humorous travel account with-that pseudonym. In 1864 Twain left for California, where worked in San Francisco as a reporter. After hearing a story about a frog told by Ben Coon, Twain made entry in his notebook: “Coleman with his jumping frog-bet a stranger 50$- Stranger had no frog and Coleman got him one:-In the meantime stranger filled Coleman’s frog full of short and he couldn’t jump. The stranger’s frog won”. From these lines he developed “Jim Smiley and his jumping frog/” which was published in the Saturday Press of New York on the 18^th of November in 1865. It reprinted all over the country and became the foundation stone of the celebration jumping frog Calaveras country, and other sketches (1867). This work marked the beginning of Twain’s literary career. The name of “Mark Twain” became known as the author of that sketch and the two were permanently associated from the day of its publication.¹²
Such fame as it brought did not yield heavy financial return. Its author continued to win a more or less precarious livelihood doing miscellaneous work.
In 1866 Sam was hired by the Sacramento union to visit and report on the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii). His writings were so popular that, upon his return, he embarked upon his first lecture tour, which established him as a successful stage performer. On his return to San Francisco he contributed an article on the Hornet disaster to Harper’s Magazine and looked forward to its publication as a beginning of a real career. But alas when it appeared the printer and the proof-reader had somehow converted “Mark Twain” into “Mark Swain” and his dreams perished .
Undecided as to his plans, he was one day advised by a friend to deliver a lecture. He was already known as an entertaining talker and his adviser judged his possibilities well. In “Roughing it” we find the story of that first lecture and its success. He followed it with other lectures up and dawn the coast. He had added one more profession to his intellectual stock in trade.
It was about this time that the first great Mediterranean steamship excursion began to be exploited. No such ocean picnic had ever been planned before and it created a good deal of interest East and West. Mark Twain heard of it and wanted to go. He wrote to friends on the “Alta California” of San Francisco and the publishers of that paper had sufficient faith to advance the money for his passage on the understanding that he was to contribute frequent letters at twenty dollars apiece. It was a liberal offer as rates went in those days and a god send in the fullest sense of the world to Mark Twain.
Hired by the Alta California to continue his travel writing from the east, Sam arrived in New York City in 1867. He quickly signed up for a steamship tour of Europe-France and Italy. He returned in August, 1868, with the manuscript of the “Innocents Abroad” and being manufactured, lectured throughout the East and Middle West, Making his headquarters in Hartford and in Elmira New York. His Experiences Twain later recorded in “The Innocents Abroad”. The work which gained min wide popularity pocked fun at both American and European prejudices and manners. It was also on this trip that Clemens met his future brother-in-law, Charles Langdon.
Langdon reportedly showed Sam a picture of his sister Olivia and Sam fell in love at first sight. The success of “The Innocents Abroad” gave Twain enough financial security to marry Olivia Langdon in 1870, after writing about 189 love letters during his courtship. The book published in July 1869 and its success was immediate and abundant. On his wedding day on February 2, 1870, Clemens received a check from his publishers for more than four thousand dollars, royalty accumulated during the three months preceding. The sales soon amounted to more than fifty thousand copies and had increased to very nearly one hundred thousand at the end of the first three years. It was a book of travel, its lowest price three dollars and fifty cents. Even with our increased reading population no such sale is found for a book of that description today. And the “Innocents Abroad” holds its place still outsells every other book in its particular field.
At 34 years of age , Clemens entered into the longest and faithful contact of his life; his marriage to Olivia Langdon Clemens. She was the daughter of a New York coal magnate a member of the country’s wealthy elite. For a poor boy from the West, who had seen the world from the bottom up, this was such high society that he often felt like “Little Sammy in Fairy Land”.
“I first saw her in the form of any ivory miniature in her brother’s stateroom on the steamer Quaker City on the Bay of Smyrna in summer of 1867, when she was in her twenty-second year. I saw her in the flesh for the first time in New York in the following December. She was slender and beautiful and girlish and she was both girl and woman. She remained both girl and woman to the last day of her life. Under a grave and gentle exterior burned inextinguishable fires of sympathy, energy, devotion, enthusiasm and absolutely limitless affection. She was always frail, whose hopefulness and courage were indestructible.”.1.
But winning Lively meant for more than a status change for Clemens. She would be partner, editor and fellow traveler in success and failure for the next thirty five years. She would also furnish him her family’s home in Elmira, New York , a place where he visited often and wrote many of his best loved books. They settled in Buffalo, New York where Sam had become a partner, editor and writer for the daily newspaper the Buffalo Express. While living in Buffalo, their first child, Langdon Clemens was born. In a effort to be closer to his publisher, Sam and his family moved to, hear of Nook farm, a residential area that was home numerous writers, publishers and other prominent figures.
Clemens meanwhile had sold out his interest in the Express, severed his connection with the Galaxy, a magazine for which he was doing a department each month and had written a second book for the American Publishing Company -“Roughing It”, published in 1872. The same year the Clemens first daughter Suzy was born, but their son Langdon died at the age of two from diphtheria. In August of the same year he made a trip to London to get material for a book on England but was too much sought after, too continuously feted to do any work. He went alone but in November returned with the purpose of taking Mrs. Clemens and the new baby, Suzy to England the following spring. They returned to America in November and Clemens hurried back to London alone to deliver a notable series of lectures under the management of George Dolby formerly managing agent for Charles Dickens. For two month Mark Twain lectured steadily to London audiences, the big Hanover square rooms always filled. He returned to his family in January 1874.
In 1873, Sam’s focus turned toward social criticism. He and Hartford Courant publisher Charles Dudley Warner co-wrote “The Gilded Age” a novel that attacked political corruption big business and the American obsession with getting rich that seemed to dominate the era.
Meantime, a home was being built for them in Hartford a year after publication of “The Gilded Age”. The Clemens’s elaborate $40.000. The 19-room house on Farmington Avenue was completed . In the autumn of 1874 they took up residence in it. Happy residence continued through seventeen years well-night perfect years. ¹³
Their summers they spent in Elmira on Quarry farm- a beautiful hilltop the home of Mrs. Clemens sister. It was in Elmira that much of Mark Twain’s literary work was done. He had a special study there, some distance from the house, where he Roved to work out his fancies and put them into visible form.
It was not so easy to work at Hartford; there was too much going on. The Clemens home was a sort of general headquarters for literary folk, near and far and for distinguished foreign visitors of every sort. Howells and Aldrich used it as their half-way station between Boston and New York and every foreign notable who visited America made a pilgrimage to Hartford to see Mark Twain. Some went as far as Elmira among them Rudyard Kipling, who recorded his visit in a chapter of his “American notes”. Kipling declared he had come all the way from India to see Mark Twain.
“ I am an American. I was born and reared in Hartford, in the state of Connecticut anyway, just over the river, on the country. So I am a Yankee of the Yankees and particular; yes and nearly barren of sentiment, I suppose-or poetry, in other words”.1.
Twain continued to lecture in the United States and England. Between 1876 and 1884. He published several masterpieces. “Tom Sawyer”, “The prince and the pauper”, “Life on the Mississippi”, “Huckleberry Finn” and “ A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” were among the volumes that had entertained the world and inspired it with admiration and love for their author. Tom Sawyer was originally intended for adults. Twain had abandoned the work in 1874, but returned to it in the following summer and even then was undecided if he were writing a book for adults or for young readers. Eventually he declared that it was “professedly and confessedly a boy’s and girl’s book.” “The prince and the pauper”(1881) was about Edward VI of England and a little pauper who changed places.
The book was dedicated “to those good-mannered agreeable children Susie and Clara Clemens”, “Life of Mississippi”(1883) contained an attack on the influence of sir Walter Scott, whose romanticism have caused according to Twain “measureless harm” to progressive ideas.
From the very beginning of his journalistic career, Twain made fun with the novel and its tradition. Although Twain enjoyed magnificent popularity as a novelist, he believed the he lacked the analytical sensibility necessary to the novelist’s art. In 1878-79 he had taken his family to Europe, where they spent their time in travelling over the Continent. It was during this period that he was joined by his intimate friend, the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, of Hartford and the two made a journey, the story of which is told in “A tramp Abroad”. In 1891 the Harford house was again closed, the time indefinitely and the family, now five in number, took up residence in Berlin. The typesetting machine and the unfortunate publishing venture were drawing heavily on the family
Finances at this period and the cost of the Hartford establishment was too great to be maintained. During the next three years he was distracted by the financial struggle which ended in April, 1894 with the failure of Charles L. Webster and Co. Mark Twain now found himself bankrupt and nearly one hundred thousand dollars in dept. It had been a losing fight with this bitter ending always in view; yet during this period of hard, hopeless effort he had written a large portion of the book which of all his works will perhaps survive the longest his tender and beautiful story of “Joan of Arc”. All his life Joan had been his favorite character in the world’s history and during those trying months and years of the early nineties in Berlin, in Florence, in Paris, he was conceiving and putting his picture of that gentle girl-warrior into perfect literary form. It was published in Harper’s Magazine anonymously, because he said it would not have been received seriously had it appeared over his own name.
The authorship was presently recognized. Exquisitely, reverently as the story was told, it had in it the, touch of quaint and gentle humor which could only have been given to it by Mark Twain.
It was only now and then that Mark Twain lectured during those years. He had made a reading tour with George Washington. Cable during winter of 1884-85, but he abominated the platform and often bowed he would never appear before an audience again. Yet in 1895, when he was sixty years old, he decided to rebuild his fortunes by making a reading tour around the world. It was not required of him to pay his debts in full. The creditors were willing to accept fifty percent of the liabilities and had agreed to a settlement on that basis. But this not satisfy Mrs. Clemens and it did not satisfy him. They decided to pay dollar for dollar. They sailed for America and in July, 1895, set out from Elmira on the long trail across land and sea. Mrs. Clemens and Clara Clemens joined this pilgrimage, Suzy and Jean Clemens remaining at Elmira with their aunt. Looking out of the car windows, the travelers saw Suzy waving them an adieu. It was a picture they would long remember.
The reading tour was one of triumph. High prices and crowded houses prevailed everywhere. The author – reader visited Australia, New Zealand, India, Ceylon, South Africa arriving in England, at last with the money and material which would pay off the heavy burden of debt and make him once more free before the world. And in That hour of triumph came the heavy blow. Suzy Clemens never very strong, had been struck down. The first cable announced her illness. The mother and Clara sailed at once. Before they were half way across the ocean a second cable announced that Suzy was died. The father had to meet and endine the heart – break alone; he could not reach America, in time for the burial. He remained in England and was joined there by the sorrowing family.
They passed that winter in London, where he worked at the story of his travels. Following the Equator the proofs of which he read the next summer in Switzerland. The returns from it and from his reading venture wiped away Mark Twain’s indebtedness and made him free. He would go back to America; as he said able to look any man in the face again. Yet he did not immediately. He could live more economically abroad and economy was still necessary. The family spent two winters in Vienna, and their apartment there constituted a veritable court where the world’s notables gathered. Another winter in England followed and then in the letter part of 1900, they went home-that is; to America. Mrs. Clemens never could bring herself to return to Hartford and never saw their home there again.
When they returned to America Mrs. Clemens health failed and in the autumn of 1903 the family went to Florence for her benefit.
There on the 5^th of June 1904 she died. They brought her back and laid her beside Suzy at Elmira. That winter the family moved to New York and lived there, until 1908, when he moved into his last house, which he built in Redding and called it “Storm field”.
His work did not cease when the pressing need of money came to an end. He was full of ideas and likely to begin a new article or story at any time. He wrote and published a number of notable sketches, articles, stories even books, during these later years, among them that marvelous short story “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”. In that story , as in most of his later work, he proved to the world that he was much more than a humorist that he was, in fact a great teacher, moralist, philosopher, the greatest, perhaps, of his age. In 1909, his middle daughter Clara was married. In the same year Jean, the youngest daughter died from an epileptic seizure. It was on the day before a Christmas, 1909, that heavy bereavement once more came into the life of Mark Twain.
As he approached the end of his life, Clemens grew more lonely and melancholic. He took on a dozen or so surrogate grandchildren. He Traveled to Bermuda for health and relaxation. He played billiards with friends.
His own end followed by a few month that of his daughter. There were already indications that his heart was seriously affected and soon after Jean’s death he sought the warm climate of Bermuda. But his malady made rapid progress and in April he returned to Stormfield. He died there just a week later, April 21, 1910. When he died, newspapers around the country declared. “The whole world is mouring”. By then Sam Clemens had long since ceased to be a private citizen. He had become Mark Twain a proud possession of the American nation. Mark Twain passed away, but has a following today. “Now he is gone and our thoughts of him are tender, grateful, proud. We are glad of his friendship; glad that he expressed so richly one of the great elements in the temperament of America glad that he has left such an honorable as a man of letters and glad also for his own sake that after many deep sorrows he is at piece and we trust, happy in the fuller light.
Twain , robust , big-hearted, gifted with the divine power of use words, makes us all laugh together, builds true romances with prolirve fire and Western clay and shows us that we are at one on all the main points, we fell that he has been appointed by Providence to see it that the precious ordinary self of the Republic shall suffer no harm.”.1.
His childhood home is open to the public as a museum in Hannibal and Calaveras Country in California holds the Calaveras Country Fair and Jumping Frog Jubilee every third weekend in May. Walking tours are given in New York City of places Twain visited near his birthday every year.