It’s the birthday of Mark Twain (1835-1910), often called the father of American literature and sometimes credited as the author of the first great American novel (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1885).

(NB: The term “great American novel” was coined by a novelist named John William DeForest in 1868, which predates Huck Finn. DeForest believed that the great American novel did not yet exist but that Uncle Tom’s Cabin came close.)

Twain was born Samuel L. Clemens in Florida, Missouri, the sixth of seven children, and raised mostly in Hannibal, Missouri, a port town on the banks of the Mississippi; his family owned one enslaved person, and he grew up hanging around slave quarters, listening to stories and spirituals. Twain had poor health and mischievous spirits as a child, which combination made life hard for his mother. Twain’s father died when Twain was only 11, and he soon began to work as a printer’s apprentice, which allowed him to read news while arranging type. At 18 he left for newspaper work in the east, then became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi for several years, a profession he loved; this job ended when the Civil War began in 1861.

Twain went west to Carson City, Nevada, where he failed as a silver prospector but started writing for a paper, the Territorial Enterprise. In February, 1863, he began using the pen name Mark Twain, which he took from another riverboat pilot named Isaiah Sellers, mistakenly believing Sellers had died and the name was up for grabs. In 1864 he skipped town for San Francisco (something about a duel), then left San Francisco (something about police corruption and a brawl) to do some mining in the Tuolumne foothills, where he heard a famous story about a jumping frog. He wrote it up as the short story “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” which appeared in many papers, and boom, he was famous.

Twain’s travel book, The Innocents Abroad, appeared in 1869. In 1870, he married Olivia (Livy) Langdon. They lived first in Buffalo, New York, then Hartford, Connecticut, and there he wrote his most famous works: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), Huck Finn, and others. Bad investments led to financial troubles, and he moved his family to Europe (1891-1900); they traveled extensively while he lectured. One of Twain’s daughters, Susy, died at 24 in 1896, a devastating loss for Twain. (He and Livy had already lost an infant son years earlier.) Livy died in 1904—more devastation, and soon after Twain wrote Eve’s Diary (1906), a funny but moving account of Adam and Eve’s relationship which ends with Adam observing upon Eve’s death, “Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.” In 1909, Twain’s youngest daughter died of an epileptic seizure. Twain himself died four months later at the age of 74.

Twain was one of those profoundly funny, deeply sad, and increasingly bitter men, too aware of the failings of human nature and unable to take comfort in organized religion, though he was not (as sometimes believed) an atheist. His final novel, in fact, was Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), whom he greatly admired and which novel he felt was his best.

Twain is also misquoted perhaps as often as he is quoted. If you want a good, reliable source for Twain quotations vetted by a scholar, go to http://www.twainquotes.com/quotesatoz.html.

It was Twain who said, in a lighter moment, “You should never do anything wicked and lay it on your brother, when it is just as convenient to lay it on some other boy” (from his satirical advice column, “Advice for Good Little Boys”).

Have a profoundly well and peaceful Friday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.