1835 Born 30 November in Florida, Mo., the sixth child of John Marshall and Jane Lampton Clemens. Of his six siblings, only Orion, Pamela, and Henry lived into adulthood. (For details, see the next appendix, “Family Biographies.”)
1839–40 Moves to Hannibal, Mo., on the west bank of the Mississippi River; enters typical western common school in Hannibal (1840).
1842–47 Spends summers at his uncle John Quarles’s farm, near Florida, Mo.
1847 On 24 March his father dies. Leaves school to work as an errand boy and apprentice typesetter for Henry La Cossitt’s Hannibal Gazette.
1848 Apprenticed to Joseph P. Ament, the new editor and owner of the Hannibal Missouri Courier. Works for and lives with Ament until the end of 1850.
1851 In January joins Orion’s newspaper, the Hannibal Western Union, where he soon prints “A Gallant Fireman,” his earliest known published work.
1853–57 After almost three years as Orion’s apprentice, leaves Hannibal in June 1853. Works as a journeyman typesetter in St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Muscatine (Iowa), Keokuk (Iowa), and Cincinnati.
1857 On 16 February departs Cincinnati on the Paul Jones, piloted by Horace E. Bixby, who agrees to train him as a Mississippi River pilot.
1858 Henry Clemens dies of injuries from the explosion of the Pennsylvania.
1859 On 9 April officially licensed to pilot steamboats “to and from St. Louis and New Orleans.” By 1861 has served as “a good average” pilot on at least a dozen boats.
1861 Becomes a Freemason (resigns from his lodge in 1869). Works as a commercial pilot until the outbreak of the Civil War. Joins the Hannibal Home Guard, a small band of volunteers with Confederate sympathies. Resigns after two weeks and accompanies Orion to Nevada Territory, where Orion will serve until 1864 as the territorial secretary. Works briefly for Orion, then prospects for silver.
1862 Prospects in the Humboldt and Esmeralda mining districts. Sends contributions signed “Josh” (now lost) to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, and in October becomes its local reporter.
1863–64 On 3 February 1863 first signs himself “Mark Twain.” While writing for the Enterprise he becomes Nevada correspondent for the San Francisco Morning Call. To escape prosecution for dueling, moves to San Francisco about 1 June 1864 and for four months works as local reporter for the Call. Writes for the Californian and the Golden Era. In early December visits Jackass Hill in Tuolumne County, Calif.
1865 Visits Angels Camp in Calaveras County, Calif. Returns to San Francisco and begins writing a daily letter for the Enterprise. Continues to write for the Californian. “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” published in the New York Saturday Press on 18 November.
1866 Travels to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) as correspondent for the Sacramento Union, to which he writes twenty-five letters. In October gives his first lecture in San Francisco.
1867 His first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches, published in May. Gives first lecture in New York City. Sails on Quaker City to Europe and the Holy Land. Meets Olivia (Livy) Langdon in New York on 27 December. In Washington, D.C., serves briefly as private secretary to Senator William M. Stewart of Nevada.
1868 Lectures widely in eastern and midwestern states. Courts and proposes to Livy, winning her consent in November.
1869 The Innocents Abroad published. With Jervis Langdon’s help, buys one-third interest in the Buffalo Express.
1870 Marries Olivia on 2 February; they settle in Buffalo in a house purchased for them by Jervis Langdon. Son, Langdon, born prematurely on 7 November.
1871 Sells Express and the house and moves to Hartford, Conn. For the next two decades the family will live in Hartford and spend summers at Quarry Farm, in Elmira.
1872 Daughter Olivia Susan (Susy) Clemens born 19 March; son Langdon dies 2 June. Roughing It published in London (securing British copyright) and Hartford. Visits London to lecture in the fall.
1873 Takes family to England and Scotland for five months. Escorts them home (Livy is pregnant) and returns to England alone in November. The Gilded Age, written with Charles Dudley Warner, published in London and Hartford.
1874 Returns home in January; daughter Clara Langdon Clemens born 8 June. The family moves into the house they have built in Hartford.
1875–76 Mark Twain’s Sketches, New and Old (1875) and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) published.
1878–79 Travels with family in Europe.
1880 A Tramp Abroad published. Daughter Jane (Jean) Clemens born 26 July.
1881 Begins to invest in Paige typesetting machine. The Prince and the Pauper published.
1882 Revisits the Mississippi to gather material for Life on the Mississippi, published 1883.
1884–85 Founds publishing house, Charles L. Webster and Co., named for his nephew by marriage, its chief officer. Reading tour with George Washington Cable (November–February). Adventures of Huckleberry Finn published in London (1884) and New York (1885). Publishes Ulysses S. Grant’s Memoirs (1885).
1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court published.
1891–94 Travels and lives in France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, with frequent business trips to the United States. Henry H. Rogers, vice-president of Standard Oil, undertakes to salvage Clemens’s fortunes. In 1894 Webster and Co. declares bankruptcy, and on Rogers’s advice Clemens abandons the Paige machine. The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson published serially and as a book in 1894.
1895 In August starts an around-the-world lecture tour to raise money, accompanied by Olivia and Clara; lectures en route to the Pacific Coast and then in Australia and New Zealand.
1896 Lectures in India, Ceylon, and South Africa. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc published. On 18 August Susy dies from meningitis in Hartford. Jean is diagnosed with epilepsy. Resides in London.
1897 Following the Equator published in London and Hartford. Lives in Weggis (Switzerland) and Vienna.
1898 Pays his creditors in full. Lives in Vienna and nearby Kaltenleutgeben.
1899–1901 Resides in London, with stays at European spas. The family returns to the United States in October 1900, living at 14 West 10th Street, New York, then in Riverdale in the Bronx. Publishes “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (February 1901).
1902 Makes last visit to Hannibal and St. Louis. Olivia’s health deteriorates severely. Isabel V. Lyon, hired as her secretary, is soon secretary to Clemens.
1903 Moves family to rented Villa di Quarto in Florence. Harper and Brothers acquires exclusive rights to all Mark Twain’s work.
1904 Begins dictating autobiography to Lyon; Jean types up her copy. Olivia dies of heart failure in Florence on 5 June. Family returns to the United States. Clemens leases a house at 21 Fifth Avenue, New York.
1905 Spends summer in Dublin, New Hampshire, with Jean. Writes “The War-Prayer.”
1906 Begins Autobiographical Dictations in January. Excerpts will appear in the North American Review, 1906–7. Rents Upton House, Dublin. Commissions John Mead Howells to design a house to be built at Redding, Conn. What Is Man? printed anonymously for private distribution.
1907 Christian Science published. Hires Ralph W. Ashcroft as business assistant. Travels to England to receive honorary degree from Oxford University.
1908 Moves into the Redding house (“Innocence at Home,” then “Stormfield”).
1909 Dismisses Lyon and Ashcroft. Jean rejoins Clemens at Stormfield. Clara marries Ossip Gabrilowitsch, pianist and conductor, on 6 October. Jean dies of heart failure on 24 December.
1910 Suffers severe angina while in Bermuda; with Paine leaves for New York on 12 April. Dies at Stormfield on 21 April.
For a much more detailed chronology, see Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, 1852–1890 (Budd 1992a, 949–97).
Biographies are provided here only for Clemens’s immediate family—his parents, siblings, wife, and children. Information about other relatives, including Olivia Clemens’s family, may be located through the Index.
John Marshall Clemens (1798–1847), Clemens’s father, was born in Virginia. As a youth he moved with his mother and siblings to Kentucky, where he studied law and in 1822 was licensed to practice. He married Jane Lampton the following year. In 1827 the Clemenses relocated to Jamestown, Tennessee, where he opened a store and eventually became a clerk of the county court. In 1835 he moved his family to Missouri, settling first in the village of Florida, where Samuel Clemens was born. Two years later he was appointed judge of Monroe County Court, earning the honorific “Judge,” which young Clemens unwittingly exaggerated into a position of great power. In 1839 he moved the family to Hannibal, where he kept a store on Main Street and was elected justice of the peace, probably in 1844. At the time of his death, he was a candidate for the position of clerk of the circuit court, but died some months before the election. He was regarded as one of the foremost citizens of the county, scrupulously honest, but within his family circle he was taciturn and irritable. A contemporary reference to John Clemens’s “shattered nerves,” together with his extensive use of medicines, may point to some chronic condition. His sudden death from pneumonia in 1847 left the family in genteel poverty. When his father died Clemens was only eleven; he later wrote that “my own knowledge of him amounted to little more than an introduction” ( Inds , 309–11; 4 Sept 1883 to Holcombe, MnHi).
Jane Lampton Clemens (1803–90), Clemens’s mother, was born in Adair County, Kentucky. Her marriage to the dour and humorless John Marshall Clemens was not a love match: late in life she confided to her family that she had married to spite another suitor. She bore seven children, of whom only four (Orion, Pamela, Samuel, and Henry [1838–58]) survived at the time of her husband’s death in 1847. The widowed Jane left Hannibal, Missouri, and between 1853 and 1870 lived in Muscatine, and possibly Keokuk, Iowa, and in St. Louis, Missouri, initially as part of Orion Clemens’s household and then with her daughter, Pamela Moffett. After Clemens married and settled in Buffalo, New York, in 1870, Jane set up house in nearby Fredonia with the widowed Pamela. In 1882 she moved to Keokuk, Iowa, where she lived with Orion for the rest of her life. She was buried in Hannibal’s Mount Olivet Cemetery, alongside her husband and her son Henry. Her Hannibal pastor called her “a woman of the sunniest temperament, lively, affable, a general favorite” (Wecter 1952, 86). She was the model for Aunt Polly in Tom Sawyer (1876), Huckleberry Finn (1885), and other works. After her death in 1890 Clemens wrote a moving tribute to her, “Jane Lampton Clemens” ( Inds , 82–92, 311).
Orion (pronounced O'-ree-ən) Clemens (1825–97), Clemens’s older brother, was born in Gainesboro, Tennessee. After the Clemens family’s move to Hannibal, Missouri, he was apprenticed to a printer. In 1850 he started the Hannibal Western Union, and the following year became the owner of the Hannibal Journal as well, employing Clemens and Henry, their younger brother, as typesetters. In 1853, shortly after Clemens left home to travel, Orion moved with his mother and Henry to Muscatine, Iowa. There he married Mary (Mollie) Stotts (1834–1904), who bore him a daughter, Jennie, in 1855. He campaigned for Lincoln in the presidential election of 1860, and through the influence of a friend was rewarded with an appointment as secretary of the newly formed Nevada Territory (1861). Mollie and Jennie joined him there in 1862; Jennie died in 1864 of spotted fever. That year Nevada became a state, and Orion could not obtain a post comparable to his territorial position. Over the next two decades he struggled to earn a living as a proofreader, inventor, chicken farmer, lawyer, lecturer, and author. From the mid-1870s until his death in 1897, Orion was supported by an amused and exasperated Clemens, who said that “he was always honest and honorable” but “he was always dreaming; he was a dreamer from birth” ( Inds , 311–13; see AutoMT1 , 451–55 and notes on 643–44).
Pamela (pronounced Pə-mee'-la) A. (Clemens) Moffett (1827–1904), also known as “Pamelia” or “Mela,” was Clemens’s older sister. Born in Jamestown, Tennessee, after the Clemens family’s move to Hannibal she attended Elizabeth Horr’s school and in November 1840 was commended by her teacher for her “amiable deportment and faithful application to her various studies.” Pamela played piano and guitar, and in the 1840s helped support the family by giving music lessons. In September 1851, she married William Anderson Moffett (1816–65), a commission merchant, and moved to St. Louis. Their children were Annie (1852–1950) and Samuel (1860–1908). From 1870 Pamela lived in Fredonia, New York. Clemens called Pamela “a lifelong invalid”; she was probably the model for Tom’s cousin Mary in Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and other works ( Inds , 313).
Olivia Louise Langdon Clemens (1845–1904), familiarly known as “Livy,” was born and raised in Elmira, New York, the daughter of wealthy coal merchant Jervis Langdon (1809–70) and Olivia Lewis Langdon (1810–90). The Langdons were strongly religious, reformist, and abolitionist. Livy’s education, in the 1850s and 1860s, was a combination of home tutoring and classes at Thurston’s Female Seminary and Elmira Female College. Always delicate, her health deteriorated into invalidism for a time between 1860 and 1864. “She was never strong again while her life lasted,” Clemens said in 1906. Clemens was first introduced to the shy and serious Livy in December 1867; he soon began an earnest and protracted courtship, conducted largely through letters. They married in February 1870 and settled in Buffalo, New York, in a house purchased for them by Livy’s father; their first child, Langdon Clemens, was born there in November. In 1871 they moved, as renters, to the Nook Farm neighborhood of Hartford, Connecticut, and quickly became an integral part of the social life of that literary and intellectual enclave. They purchased land and built the distinctive house which was their home from 1874 to 1891. Young Langdon died in 1872, but three daughters were born: Olivia Susan (Susy) in 1872, Clara in 1874, and Jane (Jean) in 1880. Clara later recalled her mother’s “unselfish, tender nature—combined with a complete understanding, both intellectual and human, of her husband”; she took “care of everything pertaining to house and home, which included hospitality to many guests,” and made “time for lessons in French and German as well as hours for reading aloud to my sisters and me” (CC 1931, 24–25). To her adoring husband, whom she addressed fondly as “Youth,” Livy was “my faithful, judicious, and painstaking editor” ( AutoMT1 , 354–59). In June 1891, with their expenses mounting and Clemens’s investments draining his earnings as well as Livy’s personal income, they permanently closed the Hartford house and left for a period of retrenchment in Europe; thenceforth Livy’s life was spent in temporary quarters, hotel suites, and rented houses. When Clemens was forced to declare bankruptcy in April 1894, the family’s financial future was salvaged by the expedient of giving Livy “preferred creditor” status and assigning all Clemens’s copyrights to her. In 1895–96 she and Clara accompanied Clemens on his round-the-world lecture tour. The death of her daughter Susy in 1896 was a blow from which she never recovered. She died of heart failure in Italy in June 1904.
Olivia Susan Clemens (1872–96), known as “Susy,” was Clemens’s eldest daughter. Her early education was conducted largely at home by her mother and, for several years starting in 1880, by a governess. Her talents for writing, dramatics, and music were soon apparent. At thirteen, she secretly began to write a biography of Clemens, much of which he later incorporated into his autobiography; it is a charming portrait of idyllic family life. Susy accompanied her parents to England in 1873 and for a longer stay abroad in 1878–79. In the fall of 1890 she left home to attend Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, but completed only one semester. In June 1891, the Clemenses closed the Hartford house, and the family, including Susy, left for a period of retrenchment in Europe that would last until mid-1895. Susy attended schools in Geneva and Berlin and took language and voice lessons, but increasingly she suffered from physical and nervous complaints for which her parents sought treatments including “mind cure” and hydrotherapy. After the European sojourn Susy chose not to go with her father, mother, and sister Clara on Clemens’s lecture trip around the world (1895–96); she and her sister Jean stayed at the Elmira, New York, home of their aunt Susan Crane. In August 1896, while visiting her childhood home in Hartford, Susy came down with a fever, which proved to be spinal meningitis. She died while her mother and sister were making the transatlantic journey to be with her. “The cloud is permanent, now,” Clemens wrote in his notebook (Notebook 40, TS p. 8, CU-MARK; see AutoMT1 , 323–28).
Clara Langdon Clemens (1874–1962), called “Bay,” was Clemens’s second daughter. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, she was mostly educated at home by her mother and governesses. During the family’s sojourn in Europe between 1891 and 1895, Clara enjoyed more independence than her sisters, returning alone to Berlin to study music. She was the only one of Clemens’s daughters to go with him and Livy on their 1895–96 trip around the world. The death of her sister Susy, and the first epileptic seizure of her other sister, Jean, both came in 1896: “It was a long time before anyone laughed in our household,” Clara recalled (CC 1931, 179). The family settled in Vienna in 1897. Clara aspired to be a pianist, studying under Theodor Leschetizky, through whom she met the young Russian pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch (1878–1936). By 1898 Clara’s vocation had changed from pianist to singer, a career in which she found more indulgence than acclaim. After her mother’s death in 1904 Clara suffered a breakdown and was intermittently away from her family at rest cures in 1905 and 1906. She was financially dependent on her father but spent less and less time in his household, traveling and giving occasional recitals. Increasingly suspicious of the control exerted by Isabel V. Lyon and Ralph Ashcroft over her father and his finances, Clara convinced Clemens to dismiss the pair in 1909. She married Gabrilowitsch in 1909; their daughter, Nina Gabrilowitsch (1910–66), was Clemens’s last direct descendant. Between 1904 and 1910 Clara lost her mother, her sister Jean, and her father; at the age of thirty-five, she was sole heir to the estate of Mark Twain, which was held in trust for her, not to be disposed in its entirety until her own death. For the rest of her life she used her influence to control the public representation of her father. Gabrilowitsch died in 1936; in 1944 Clara married Russian conductor Jacques Samossoud (1894–1966). Her memoir of Clemens, My Father, Mark Twain, was published in 1931. She spent the last decades of her life in Southern California. Clara’s bequest of Clemens’s personal papers to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962, formed the basis of the Mark Twain Papers now housed in The Bancroft Library.
Jean (Jane Lampton) Clemens (1880–1909), Clemens’s youngest daughter, was named after his mother but was always called Jean. Like her sisters, she was educated largely at home. In 1896, however, she was attending school in Elmira, New York, when she suffered a severe epileptic seizure. Sedatives were prescribed, and for the next several years her anxious parents tried to forestall the progress of her illness, even spending the summer of 1899 in Sweden so that she could be treated by the well-known osteopath Jonas Kellgren. Her condition, which worsened after her mother’s death in 1904, and the household’s frequent relocations, gave Jean little chance to develop an independent existence. In late 1899 she began teaching herself how to type so that she could transcribe her father’s manuscripts. She also loved riding and other outdoor activities, and espoused animal and human-rights causes. In October 1906 Jean was sent to a sanatorium in Katonah, New York, and remained in “exile” until April 1909, when she rejoined her father at Stormfield, in Redding, Connecticut. Over the next months she enjoyed a close, happy relationship with him and took over Isabel Lyon’s duties as secretary. Jean died at Stormfield on 24 December 1909, apparently of a heart attack suffered during a seizure. Over the next few days Clemens wrote a heart-breaking reminiscence of her entitled “Closing Words of My Autobiography.”
This text of Clemens’s speech at his seventieth birthday celebration was printed in Harper’s Weekly on 23 December 1905 with the title “Mark Twain’s 70th Birthday: Souvenir of Its Celebration” (SLC 1905g; see AD, 12 Jan 1906). It is likely that the Harper’s text was based [begin page 658] on a manuscript that Clemens provided. No manuscript has been found, however, and the source of the magazine text has not been determined.
Clemens was introduced by William Dean Howells, who commented:
Mr. Clemens has always had the effect on me of throwing me into a poetic ecstasy. (Laughter.) I know it is very uncommon. Most people speak of him in prose, and I dare say there will be a deal of prosing about him to-night; but for myself, I am obliged to resort to metre whenever I think of him.
Howells then read his own “Sonnet to Mark Twain” in which the “American joke”—personified as a “Colossus”—expounded his role as the bringer of joy and freedom and announced, “Mark Twain made me.” Howells concluded with the toast, “I will not say, ‘Oh King, live forever,’ but ‘Oh King, live as long as you like!’ ”
Well, if I made that joke, it is the best one I ever made, and it is in the prettiest language too. I never can get quite to that height. But I appreciate that joke and I shall remember it,—and I shall use it when occasion requires. (Laughter.)
I have had a great many birthdays in my time. I remember the first one very well (laughter), and I always think of it with indignation (renewed laughter); everything was so crude, unaesthetic, primeval. Nothing like this at all. (Laughter.) No proper appreciative preparation made; nothing really ready. (Prolonged laughter.) Now, for a person born with high and delicate instincts,—why, even the cradle wasn’t whitewashed,—nothing ready at all. I hadn’t any hair (laughter), I hadn’t any teeth (laughter), I hadn’t any clothes (laughter), I had to go to my first banquet just like that. (Prolonged laughter.) Well, everybody came swarming in. It was the merest little bit of a village,—hardly that, just a little hamlet, in the backwoods of Missouri, where nothing ever happened, and the people were all interested (laughter), and they all came; they looked me over to see if there was anything fresh in my line. Why, nothing ever happened in that village—I—why, I was the only thing that had really happened there (laughter) for months and months and months; and although I say it myself that shouldn’t, I came the nearest to being a real event that had happened in that village in more than two years. (Laughter.) Well, those people came, they came with that curiosity which is so provincial, with that frankness which also is so provincial, and they examined me all around and gave their opinion. Nobody asked them, and I shouldn’t have minded if anybody had paid me a compliment, but nobody did. Their opinions were all just green with prejudice, and I feel those opinions to this day. (Laughter.) Well, I stood that as long as—well, you know I was born courteous (laughter), and I stood it to the limit. I stood it an hour and then the worm turned. I was the worm; it was my turn to turn, and I turned. (Laughter.) I knew very well the strength of my position; I knew that I was the only spotlessly pure and innocent person in that whole town (laughter), and I came out and said so. And they could not say a word. It was so true. They blushed, they were embarrassed. Well, that was the first after-dinner speech I ever made (laughter). I think it was after dinner. (Renewed laughter.)
It’s a long stretch between that first birthday speech and this one. That was my cradle-song, and this is my swan-song, I suppose. I am used to swan-songs; I have sung them several times.
[begin page 659] This is my seventieth birthday, and I wonder if you all rise to the size of that proposition, realizing all the significance of that phrase, seventieth birthday.
The seventieth birthday! It is the time of life when you arrive at a new and awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which have oppressed you for a generation and stand unafraid and unabashed upon your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach—unrebuked. You can tell the world how you got there. It is what they all do. You shall never get tired of telling by what delicate arts and deep moralities you climbed up to that great place. You will explain the process and dwell on the particulars with senile rapture. I have been anxious to explain my own system this long time, and now at last I have the right.
I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way: by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else. (Laughter.) It sounds like an exaggeration, but that is really the common rule for attaining to old age. When we examine the programme of any of these garrulous old people we always find that the habits which have preserved them would have decayed us; that the way of life which enabled them to live upon the property of their heirs so long, as Mr. Choate says, would have put us out of commission ahead of time. I will offer here, as a sound maxim, this: That we can’t reach old age by another man’s road.
I will now teach, offering my way of life to whomsoever desires to commit suicide by the scheme which has enabled me to beat the doctor and the hangman for seventy years. (Laughter.) Some of the details may sound untrue, but they are not. I am not here to deceive; I am here to teach.
We have no permanent habits until we are forty. Then they begin to harden, presently they petrify, then business begins. Since forty I have been regular about going to bed and getting up—and that is one of the main things. I have made it a rule to go to bed when there wasn’t anybody left to sit up with; and I have made it a rule to get up when I had to. (Laughter.) This has resulted in an unswerving regularity of irregularity. It has saved me sound, but it would injure another person.
In the matter of diet—which is another main thing—I have been persistently strict in sticking to the things which didn’t agree with me until one or the other of us got the best of it. Until lately I got the best of it myself. (Laughter.) But last spring I stopped frolicking with mince pie after midnight; up to then I had always believed it wasn’t loaded. (Laughter.) For thirty years I have taken coffee and bread at eight in the morning, and no bite nor sup until 7.30 in the evening. Eleven hours. That is all right for me, and is wholesome, because I have never had a headache in my life, but headachy people would not reach seventy comfortably by that road, and they would be foolish to try it. And I wish to urge upon you this—which I think is wisdom—that if you find you can’t make seventy by any but an uncomfortable road, don’t you go. When they take off the Pullman and retire you to the rancid smoker, put on your things, count your checks, and get out at the first way station where there’s a cemetery. (Laughter.)
I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time. I have no other restriction as regards smoking. I do not know just when I began to smoke, I only know that it was in my father’s lifetime, and that I was discreet. He passed from this life early in 1847, when I was a shade past eleven; ever since then I have smoked publicly. As an example to others, and not [begin page 660] that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake. (Laughter.) It is a good rule. I mean, for me; but some of you know quite well that it wouldn’t answer for everybody that’s trying to get to be seventy.
I smoke in bed until I have to go to sleep; I wake up in the night, sometimes once, sometimes twice, sometimes three times, and I never waste any of these opportunities to smoke. This habit is so old and dear and precious to me that I would feel as you, sir, would feel if you should lose the only moral you’ve got—meaning the chairman—if you’ve got one: I am making no charges. (Laughter.) I will grant, here, that I have stopped smoking now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on principle, it was only to show off; it was to pulverize those critics who said I was a slave to my habits and couldn’t break my bonds. (Laughter.)
To-day it is all of sixty years since I began to smoke the limit. I have never bought cigars with life-belts around them. (Laughter.) I early found that those were too expensive for me. I have always bought cheap cigars—reasonably cheap, at any rate. Sixty years ago they cost me four dollars a barrel, but my taste has improved, latterly, and I pay seven now. (Laughter.) Six or seven. Seven, I think. Yes, it’s seven. But that includes the barrel. (Laughter.) I often have smoking-parties at my house; but the people that come have always just taken the pledge. I wonder why that is? (Laughter.)
As for drinking, I have no rule about that. When the others drink I like to help; otherwise I remain dry, by habit and preference. (Laughter.) This dryness does not hurt me, but it could easily hurt you, because you are different. (Laughter.) You let it alone.
Since I was seven years old I have seldom taken a dose of medicine, and have still seldomer needed one. But up to seven I lived exclusively on allopathic medicines. (Laughter.) Not that I needed them, for I don’t think I did; it was for economy; my father took a drug-store for a debt, and it made cod-liver oil cheaper than the other breakfast foods. (Laughter.) We had nine barrels of it, and it lasted me seven years. Then I was weaned. (Laughter.) The rest of the family had to get along with rhubarb and ipecac and such things, because I was the pet. I was the first Standard Oil Trust. (Laughter.) I had it all. By the time the drug-store was exhausted my health was established, and there has never been much the matter with me since. But you know very well it would be foolish for the average child to start for seventy on that basis. It happened to be just the thing for me, but that was merely an accident; it couldn’t happen again in a century. (Laughter.)
I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never intend to take any. Exercise is loathsome. And it cannot be any benefit when you are tired; I was always tired. (Laughter.) But let another person try my way, and see where he will come out.
I desire now to repeat and emphasize that maxim: We can’t reach old age by another man’s road. My habits protect my life, but they would assassinate you.
I have lived a severely moral life. But it would be a mistake for other people to try that, or for me to recommend it. Very few would succeed: you have to have a perfectly colossal stock of morals; and you can’t get them on a margin; you have to have the whole thing, and put them in your box. Morals are an acquirement—like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis—no man is born with them. I wasn’t myself, I started poor. I hadn’t a single moral. [begin page 661] There is hardly a man in this house that is poorer than I was then. (Laughter.) Yes, I started like that—the world before me, not a moral in the slot. Not even an insurance moral. (Laughter.) I can remember the first one I ever got. I can remember the landscape, the weather, the—I can remember how everything looked. It was an old moral, an old second-hand moral, all out of repair, and didn’t fit anyway. But if you are careful with a thing like that, and keep it in a dry place, and save it for processions, and Chautauquas, and World’s Fairs, and so on, and disinfect it now and then, and give it a fresh coat of whitewash once in a while, you will be surprised to see how well she will last and how long she will keep sweet, or at least inoffensive. When I got that mouldy old moral she had stopped growing, because she hadn’t any exercise; but I worked her hard, I worked her Sundays and all. Under this cultivation she waxed in might and stature beyond belief, and served me well and was my pride and joy for sixty-three years; then she got to associating with insurance presidents, and lost flesh and character, and was a sorrow to look at and no longer competent for business. (Laughter.) She was a great loss to me. Yet not all loss. I sold her—ah, pathetic skeleton, as she was—I sold her to Leopold, the pirate King of Belgium; he sold her to our Metropolitan Museum, and it was very glad to get her, for, without a rag on, she stands 57 feet long and 16 feet high, and they think she’s a brontosaur. (Laughter.) Well, she looks it. They believe it will take nineteen geological periods to breed her match.
Morals are of inestimable value, for every man is born crammed with sin microbes, and the only thing that can extirpate these sin microbes is morals. Now you take a sterilized Christian—I mean, you take the sterilized Christian (laughter), for there’s only one. Dear sir, I wish you wouldn’t look at me like that. (Laughter.)
Threescore years and ten!
It is the Scriptural statute of limitations. After that, you owe no active duties; for you the strenuous life is over. You are a time-expired man, to use Kipling’s military phrase: You have served your term, well or less well, and you are mustered out. You are become an honorary member of the republic, you are emancipated, compulsions are not for you, nor any bugle-call but “lights out.” You pay the time-worn duty bills if you choose, or decline if you prefer—and without prejudice—for they are not legally collectable.
The previous-engagement plea, which in forty years has cost you so many twinges, you can lay aside forever; on this side of the grave you will never need it again. If you shrink at thought of night, and winter, and the late home-coming from the banquet and the lights and the laughter through the deserted streets—a desolation which would not remind you now, as for a generation it did, that your friends are sleeping, and you must creep in a-tiptoe and not disturb them, but would only remind you that you need not tiptoe, you can never disturb them more—if you shrink at thought of these things, you need only reply, “Your invitation honors me, and pleases me because you still keep me in your remembrance, but I am seventy; seventy, and would nestle in the chimney corner, and smoke my pipe, and read my book, and take my rest, wishing you well in all affection, and that when you in your turn shall arrive at pier No. 70 you may step aboard your waiting ship with a reconciled spirit, and lay your course toward the sinking sun with a contented heart.” (Prolonged applause.)
[begin page 662]
On 3 January 1906 Clemens spoke at a dinner at The Players club, held to celebrate his renewed membership; his text was a version of the “Wapping Alice” story (SLC 1981; see AD, 10 Jan 1906, and the note at 256.5–6). The text reproduced here is from a book published in 1943 by the club’s majordomo, Walter Oettel, entitled Walter’s Sketch Book of the Players (Oettel 1943, 54–57). The source of Oettel’s text is not known. The mention of Clemens’s “slow drawling way” suggests that someone at the dinner took down the speech in shorthand, but it is also possible that Clemens gave Oettel his manuscript.
“She was,” he said, in his slow drawling way, “an English importation of Mrs. Clemens. She came well-recommended, and was duly installed as cook in our household. She was a prepossessing maiden of thirty years, well-liked by all the family.
“During the summer months the family went abroad. I and a few of the servants, including English Mary, remained at home. The house underwent renovation that summer, and among other improvements, a burglar alarm system was installed—the annunciator of the alarm being placed in my bedroom.
“One night, shortly after the system was completed, the alarm sounded. It was repeated three nights in succession, but no trace of an intruder could be found. Each time the indicator showed that a window in the basement had been tampered with. Believing it to be of little or no importance, I thought no more of it until the alarm was repeated on the fourth night. I then decided to investigate thoroughly. Putting on my robe and slippers, I quietly descended the stairs. On reaching the basement I found that Mary had company—a big strapping young fellow about twenty-five years of age. Of course I apologized for intruding, and returned to my room. The next morning I sent for Mary, to give her a mild scolding, and likewise to lend her a key to the basement door so that her evening caller might enter without causing a commotion in my room.
“It was a few months later that English Mary came to me one morning with tears in her eyes. She asked me for advice, informing me that her young friend, the handsome young Swede, was about to leave her. She confessed that circumstances made it imperative that he marry her at once. They loved each other devotedly, and she had long expected to become his wife. I told her to cheer up, I would do what I could. She was to advise me when he called that night.
“The servants were told to be in readiness to help me out of any particular difficulty. I telephoned my friend, the Chief of Police, to have a man shadow the young Romeo, to allow him to enter the house but not to leave it. Also, he must have an officer at my door at ten o’clock. In addition, I secured the services of a clerical friend for the evening.
“I stationed the police officer at the right of my library door, and told him to enter if I rang the bell three times. The clergyman hid himself in a little room on the side of my bedroom. (This was, by the way, the hottest place in the whole house.) I explained to my friend that I expected a wedding party, and wanted him to tie the knot. I had ordered good things to eat and drink to celebrate the event—for I anticipated a victory.
[begin page 663] “The young man arrived very early, to say good-bye. Mary persuaded him to come up to speak to me also. He entered my room, carrying himself in a most flippant manner. I liked the fellow, however. Despite his self-assurance, he had an open countenance which a woman of Mary’s type could not resist.
“First, I asked his name, and he told me. As to his prospects in life, he said he expected to earn a good living at his trade, carpentering. I told him that he owed it to Mary to propose an immediate marriage. He said he would think it over.
“ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘you have exactly five minutes to think it over. You have your choice of two things, marriage or prison.’ I pulled out my watch and put it on the table beside me, and lit a fresh cigar.
“He said that he was going then, but he would let me know his decision the next day. ‘One minute,’ I said. ‘When you entered this room I locked the door and put the key in my pocket. You have now three minutes to think. In the meantime let me tell you that an indictment for housebreaking is hanging over you for entering my house, night after night. Five years in prison is the penalty for that offense. There is a police officer in the next room, waiting to take you into custody. Now, I want you and Mary to be happy. She loves you, and she is soon to be the mother of your child. She has a good home here, and I want you to share it with her. You may have the best room in the house until the family comes back. Mary will make a good wife to you. A clergyman is waiting in the next room, the servants are ready to witness your marriage, and everything is ready for a fine wedding. We can all have a big time.’
“Well, the fellow made a number of excuses, but I disposed of them all. Finally he consented to be married peaceably. I called Mary, the rest of the servants, and the minister. English Mary became a bride that night. The policeman stood up with her, and we all had a jolly time after the ceremony.
“The couple lived with us for three months before starting their own home. We left Hartford the next year, and it was not until two years later that I returned to the city. I was walking from the depot when I saw a man driving a team of spirited horses. He seemed to be gazing at me. Suddenly he drew up near me and asked: ‘Don’t you know me, Mr. Clemens? I am Frank, Mary’s husband.’ I expressed my gladness at seeing him, and inquired about Mary and the baby.
“ ‘Mr. Clemens,’ he said, ‘it was the best thing you ever did—to make me marry Mary. She has been a fine wife to me. She had a little money saved and with that she started me in business. This is my rig; I am a contractor and builder now. You must come to see us . . . As to my family—there was never a baby, or any suspicion of any.’ ”
Below is a list of each piece in this volume and its publication history. All works cited by an abbreviation such as MTA, by SLC and a date, or by NAR (North American Review) and an installment number are fully defined in References. The term “partial publication” indicates that the text may be merely an excerpt, or be nearly complete. Charles Neider, the editor of The Autobiography of Mark Twain (AMT), reordered and recombined excerpts to such an extent that all publication in his volume is considered partial. At the end of this appendix is a list of the “Chapters from My Autobiography” published in NAR installments between 7 September 1906 and December 1907. Except for the subtitle “Random Extracts from It” (which Clemens himself enclosed in brackets), bracketed titles have been editorially supplied for works that Clemens left untitled.
Preliminary Manuscripts and Dictations, 1870–1905
[The Tennessee Land]: MTA, 1:3–7, partial; AMT, 22–24.
[Early Years in Florida, Missouri]: SLC 1922a, 274–75; MTA , 1:7–10; AMT, 1–3.
[The Grant Dictations]
The Chicago G.A.R. Festival: MTA , 1:13–19; AMT, 241–45.
[A Call with W. D. Howells on General Grant]: MTA , 1:24–27.
Grant and the Chinese: MTA , 1:20–24.
Gerhardt: previously unpublished.
About General Grant’s Memoirs: MTA, 1:27–57, 57–68, partial.
[The Rev. Dr. Newman]: MTA, 1:68–70.
The Machine Episode: MTA, 1:70–78, partial.
Travel-Scraps I: previously unpublished.
[Four Sketches about Vienna]
[Beauties of the German Language]: MTA, 1:164–66.
[Comment on Tautology and Grammar]: MTA, 1:172–74.
[A Group of Servants]: SLC 2009, 61–69.
[A Viennese Procession]: MTA, 1:166–71.
My Debut as a Literary Person: SLC 1899d; SLC 1900b, 84–127; SLC 1903a, 11–47.
Horace Greeley: MTE, 347–48.
Lecture-Times: MTA, 1:147–53, partial; AMT, 161, 166–69.
Ralph Keeler: MTA, 1:154–64; AMT, 161–62, 163–66.
Scraps from My Autobiography. From Chapter IX: NAR 2, 453–56, partial; NAR 17, 4–12, partial; MTA, 1:125–43; AMT, 37–43, 44–47; SLC 2004, 157–60, partial.
Scraps from My Autobiography. Private History of a Manuscript That Came to Grief: MTA, 1:175–89, partial.
[Reflections on a Letter and a Book]: SLC 1922c, 312–15, partial.
[Something about Doctors]: previously unpublished.
[Henry H. Rogers]: MTA , 1:250–56, partial.
[Anecdote of Jean]: previously unpublished.
Autobiography of Mark Twain
An Early Attempt: previously unpublished.
My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It]: NAR 1, 322–30, partial; NAR 13, 449–63, partial; SLC 1922a, 275–76, partial; MTA , 1:81–115, partial; AMT, 1, 3–21, 24–25; SLC 2004, 61–62, 97–99, partial.
The Latest Attempt: MTA, 1:193.
The Final (and Right) Plan: SLC 1922a, 273; MTA, 1:xviii.
Preface. As from the Grave (section I): MTA, 1:xv–xvi; AMT, xxviii.
Preface. As from the Grave (sections II and III): previously unpublished.
[The Florentine Dictations]
[John Hay]: NAR 12, 344–46, partial; MTA , 1:232–38.
Notes on “Innocents Abroad”: NAR 20, 465–71; MTA , 1:238–46; AMT, 143, 147–51.
[Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Bailey Aldrich]: NAR 2, 456–59; MTA, 1:246– 50; AMT, 288–90.
[Villa di Quarto]: MTA , 1:195–232, partial; AMT, 314–22.
Note for the Instruction of Future Editors and Publishers of This Autobiography: AMT , xi.
Autobiographical Dictations, January–March 1906
9 January: MTA , 1:269–78, partial.
10 January: MTA, 1:278–91.
11 January: NAR 25, 481–89, partial.
12 January: NAR 16, 785–88, partial; MTA, 1:291–303, partial.
13 January: NAR 16, 788–92, partial; MTA, 1:303–12; AMT, 98–101.
15 January: NAR 16, 792–93, partial; MTA, 1:312–26, partial; AMT, 101–2.
16 January: MTA, 1:326–35.
17 January: NAR 14, 570–71, partial; MTA, 1:335–45, partial.
18 January: MTA, 1:345–50.
19 January: NAR 8, 1217–24, partial; NAR 22, 13–17, partial; MTA, 1:350–61, partial; AMT, 112–18.
23 January: MTA, 2:1–13, partial.
24 January: MTA, 2:13–23.
1 February: NAR 3, 577–80, partial; MTA, 2:23–33; AMT, 183, 185–86, 322.
2 February: NAR 3, 580–85, partial; MTA, 2:33–44, partial; AMT, 190–95, 322–24.
5 February: NAR 3, 585–89, partial; MTA, 2:44–59; AMT, 195–201.
6 February: MTA, 2:59–64, partial.
7 February: NAR 4, 705–10, partial; MTA, 2:64–73, partial; AMT, 201–3, 274–75.
8 February: NAR 4, 710–16; MTA, 2:73–83, partial; AMT, 204–10; SLC 2004, 173–76, partial.
9 February: NAR 5, 833–38; MTA, 2:83–91, partial; AMT, 210–13; SLC 2004, 15–19, partial.
12 February: NAR 5, 838–44; MTA, 2:91–99, partial; AMT, 33–37, 213–14.
13 February: MTA, 2:99–105; AMT, 43–44, 183–85.
14 February: MTA, 2:106–12; AMT, 186–90.
15 February: MTA, 2:112–17, partial; MTE, 249–52, partial.
16 February: MTA, 2:117–19, partial; MTE, 77–81, partial.
20 February: MTA, 2:120–26.
21 February: MTA, 2:126–28, partial.
22 February: MTA, 2:128–34.
23 February: MTA, 2:135–39, partial.
26 February: NAR 6, 961–64, partial; MTA, 2:139–51, partial.
5 March: NAR 7, 1089–91, partial; MTA , 2:151–60; SLC 2004, 20–22, partial.
6 March: NAR 7, 1092–95, partial; MTA, 2:160–66, partial.
7 March: NAR 6, 964–69; MTA, 2:166–72, partial.
8 March: NAR 21, 691–95, partial; MTA, 2:172–80, partial; AMT, 67–70.
9 March: NAR 23, 161–63, partial; MTA, 2:180–86, partial; AMT, 70–73.
12 March: MTA, 2:187–96.
14 March: MTA, 2:196–200, partial.
15 March: MTA, 2:200–212, partial.
16 March: MTA, 2:212–21, partial; AMT, 73–78.
20 March: MTL, 2:790–94, partial; MTE, 83–91, partial.
21 March: MTA, 2:221–29, partial.
22 March: NAR 6, 969–70, partial; MTA, 2:229–37; AMT, 190.
23 March: NAR 7, 1094–95, partial; MTA , 2:237–43, partial.
26 March: NAR 1, 321–22, partial; MTA, 2:243–56, partial; AMT, 107–9.
27 March: MTA, 2:256–68; AMT, 109–12.
28 March: NAR 10, 113–18, partial; MTA, 2:268–75, partial; AMT, 84–88.
29 March: NAR 10, 118–19, partial; NAR 11, 225–29, partial; MTA, 2:275–91, partial; AMT, 88–95, 98, 102–3.
30 March: MTA, 2:291–303, partial.
“Chapters from My Autobiography” in the North American Review, 1906–1907
The texts listed below in italic type were published in full or nearly so—that is, with no more than a paragraph or occasional sentence omitted.
| Installment | Published | Contents |
| NAR 1 | 7 Sept 1906 | AD, 26 Mar 1906 (Introduction); My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It] (first part) |
| NAR 2 | 21 Sept 1906 | AD, 21 May 1906; Scraps from My Autobiography. From Chapter IX (first part); [Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Bailey Aldrich]; AD, 3 Apr 1906 |
| NAR 3 | 5 Oct 1906 | ADs, 1 Feb 1906, 2 Feb 1906, 5 Feb 1906 |
| NAR 4 | 19 Oct 1906 | ADs, 7 Feb 1906, 8 Feb 1906 |
| NAR 5 | 2 Nov 1906 | ADs, 9 Feb 1906, 12 Feb 1906 |
| NAR 6 | 16 Nov 1906 | ADs, 26 Feb 1906, 7 Mar 1906, 22 Mar 1906 |
| NAR 7 | 7 Dec 1906 | ADs, 5 Mar 1906, 6 Mar 1906, 23 Mar 1906 |
| NAR 8 | 21 Dec 1906 | AD, 19 Jan 1906 |
| NAR 9 | 4 Jan 1907 | ADs, 13 Dec 1906, 1 Dec 1906, 2 Dec 1906 |
| NAR 10 | 18 Jan 1907 | ADs, 28 Mar 1906, 29 Mar 1906 |
| NAR 11 | 1 Feb 1907 | ADs, 29 Mar 1906 (misdated 28 Mar in the NAR), 2 Apr 1906 |
| NAR 12 | 15 Feb 1907 | [John Hay]; ADs, 5 Apr 1906, 6 Apr 1906 |
| NAR 13 | 1 Mar 1907 | My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It] (second part) |
| NAR 14 | 15 Mar 1907 | ADs, 6 Dec 1906, 17 Dec 1906, 11 Feb 1907 (misdated 10 Feb in the NAR), 12 Feb 1907, 17 Jan 1906 |
| NAR 15 | 5 Apr 1907 | ADs, 8 Oct 1906, 22 Jan 1907 |
| NAR 16 | 19 Apr 1907 | ADs, 12 Jan 1906, 13 Jan 1906, 15 Jan 1906 |
| NAR 17 | 3 May 1907 | AD, 15 Oct 1906; Scraps from My Autobiography. From Chapter IX (second part) |
| NAR 18 | 17 May 1907 | ADs, 21 Dec 1906, 28 Mar 1907 |
| NAR 19 | 7 June 1907 | ADs, 21 Dec 1906 (with note dated 22 Dec), 19 Nov 1906, 30 Nov 1906, 28 Mar 1907, 5 Sept 1906 |
| NAR 20 | 5 July 1907 | Notes on “Innocents Abroad”; AD, 23 Jan 1907 |
| NAR 21 | 2 Aug 1907 | ADs, 8 Nov 1906, 8 Mar 1906, 6 Jan 1907 |
| NAR 22 | Sept 1907 | ADs, 10 Oct 1906, 19 Jan 1906 (dated 12 Mar 1906 in the NAR, with note dated 13 May 1907), 20 Dec 1906 |
| NAR 23 | Oct 1907 | ADs, 9 Mar 1906, 16 Mar 1906, 26 July 1907, 30 July 1907 |
| NAR 24 | Nov 1907 | ADs, 9 Oct 1906, 16 Oct 1906, 11 Oct 1906, 12 Oct 1906, 23 Jan 1907 |
| NAR 25 | Dec 1907 | ADs, 11 Jan 1906, 3 Oct 1907 |