The Impossible Contradictions of Mark Twain

Summary

In 1857, Sam stumbled into the job that would shape his identity. Aboard a southbound steamboat—part of some half-baked scheme involving the Amazon River and coca—he met a pilot who offered to teach him, for a fee, the “wonderful science” of river navigation. Sam signed on, and between steering and spinning yarns with his fellow-rivermen he expanded his reading far beyond the boyhood canon of “Robin Hood,” “Robinson Crusoe,” and “The Arabian Nights.” Now it was John Milton, Thomas Paine, Sir Walter Scott, and Shakespeare. His journals show him collecting material like a magpie—speech, scenes, characters. During this time, he also picked up his pen name: “mark twain,” riverboat slang for a depth of twelve feet, meaning safe, navigable water.Then came the Civil War, which sank the steamboat trade and split the Clemens family down the middle. Twain’s war record was brief enough to fit on a cocktail napkin: he joined the Missouri State Guard for two weeks, then bailed. (“I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating,” he wrote later.) Rather than fight over slavery, he headed West, to a different kind of chaos—a raw frontier full of men who, like him, were “smitten with the silver fever.”In Virginia City, Nevada, Sam Clemens found his groove as a newspaperman; calling him a “journalist,” though, might be a stretch. The papers typically had a casual relationship with facts, and Sam delighted in testing how far he could push things. One of his first pieces for the Territorial Enterprise, dated October 1, 1862, included a complete fabrication: a wagon put “through an Indian fight that to this day has no parallel in history,” as he later recalled in “Roughing It” (1872). Reading it in print the next morning, he had an epiphany: “I felt that I had found my legitimate occupation at last.”By twenty-six, Sam was fully formed—auburn hair, a mustache, and a wardrobe permanently under siege from smoke, whiskey, and the grime of vagabond living. He covered every...