This is the first of four episodes in a comprehensive documentary exploring the life, works, and legacy of Samuel Langhorne Clemens – better known to the world as Mark Twain, one of the most influential and beloved American authors of all time.
Part 1 covers:
Childhood in Hannibal, Missouri – the real-life inspiration for St. Petersburg in Tom Sawyer
Early hardships: father's death, poverty, and apprenticeship as a printer
The Mississippi River years – becoming a riverboat pilot and absorbing the voices that would later fill his books
First pseudonyms, early journalism, and the birth of "Mark Twain"
The Civil War's impact and his departure from the South
Narrated with archival photos, letters, rare footage, and expert commentary, this series reveals the man behind the humor – a complex figure shaped by loss, adventure, satire, and an unyielding moral compass.
Full series runtime ≈ 3–4 hours (split into 4 parts for easier viewing).
Watch in order for the complete story.
Playlist link for all 4 parts: [insert your playlist link here]
Full channel documentaries: [link to channel or relevant playlist]
Perfect for literature lovers, American history enthusiasts, and anyone who grew up with Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, or Twain's timeless wit.
Subscribe & turn on notifications to catch Part 2 soon!
🎞️ Production Information
Documentary Title: Mark Twain (multi-part biography)
Focus: Life of Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain)
Part: 1 of 4 – Early Years & Riverboat Days
Genre: Biographical documentary, literary history, American culture
Language: English (or Persian dub/sub if applicable)
Approximate Part Duration: ~45–60 minutes
Key Themes in Part 1: Hannibal childhood, printing apprenticeship, Mississippi River pilot years, early writing career
#MarkTwain #MarkTwainDocumentary #SamuelClemens #AmericanLiterature #HuckleberryFinn #TomSawyer #MississippiRiver #LiteraryBiography #AmericanHistory #ClassicAuthors #Part1 #DocumentarySeries #WritersLife #19thCenturyAmerica #TwainLegacy
#Documentary #RareDocumentary #WarDocumentary #TheCivilWar #VintageDocumentary #ClassicDocumentary #HistoryDocumentary #TrueCrimeDocumentary #ScienceDocumentary #RetroFilm #OldDocumentary #ForgottenFilms #ArchiveFootage #CultDocumentary #HistoricalFootage #DocVault
Part 1 covers:
Childhood in Hannibal, Missouri – the real-life inspiration for St. Petersburg in Tom Sawyer
Early hardships: father's death, poverty, and apprenticeship as a printer
The Mississippi River years – becoming a riverboat pilot and absorbing the voices that would later fill his books
First pseudonyms, early journalism, and the birth of "Mark Twain"
The Civil War's impact and his departure from the South
Narrated with archival photos, letters, rare footage, and expert commentary, this series reveals the man behind the humor – a complex figure shaped by loss, adventure, satire, and an unyielding moral compass.
Full series runtime ≈ 3–4 hours (split into 4 parts for easier viewing).
Watch in order for the complete story.
Playlist link for all 4 parts: [insert your playlist link here]
Full channel documentaries: [link to channel or relevant playlist]
Perfect for literature lovers, American history enthusiasts, and anyone who grew up with Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, or Twain's timeless wit.
Subscribe & turn on notifications to catch Part 2 soon!
🎞️ Production Information
Documentary Title: Mark Twain (multi-part biography)
Focus: Life of Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain)
Part: 1 of 4 – Early Years & Riverboat Days
Genre: Biographical documentary, literary history, American culture
Language: English (or Persian dub/sub if applicable)
Approximate Part Duration: ~45–60 minutes
Key Themes in Part 1: Hannibal childhood, printing apprenticeship, Mississippi River pilot years, early writing career
#MarkTwain #MarkTwainDocumentary #SamuelClemens #AmericanLiterature #HuckleberryFinn #TomSawyer #MississippiRiver #LiteraryBiography #AmericanHistory #ClassicAuthors #Part1 #DocumentarySeries #WritersLife #19thCenturyAmerica #TwainLegacy
#Documentary #RareDocumentary #WarDocumentary #TheCivilWar #VintageDocumentary #ClassicDocumentary #HistoryDocumentary #TrueCrimeDocumentary #ScienceDocumentary #RetroFilm #OldDocumentary #ForgottenFilms #ArchiveFootage #CultDocumentary #HistoricalFootage #DocVault
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00:00I was made merely in the image of God, but not otherwise resembling him enough to be
00:00:13mistaken for him, by anybody but a very near-sighted person.
00:00:20I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man, because he was disappointed in the monkey.
00:00:28Mark Twain
00:00:30He was a southerner and a northerner, a westerner and a New England Yankee, a tireless wanderer
00:00:47who lived in a thousand places all around the world.
00:00:50He would call just two of them home, the Missouri town of his childhood, which he would transform
00:01:00into the idealized hometown of every American boy, and the magnificent Connecticut house
00:01:06he built for his wife and children, which he hoped would shelter them from hardship, but
00:01:13where heartbreak found them nonetheless.
00:01:15During his long life, he was a printer's apprentice and a riverboat pilot, a prospector who never
00:01:25struck gold, and a confederate soldier who never fought a battle.
00:01:30He was considered the funniest man on earth, a brilliant performer on the lecture circuit,
00:01:39who could entertain almost any audience, and a spectacularly inept businessman, whose countless
00:01:46schemes to get rich quick threatened again and again to bring him to ruin.
00:01:52But above all, Mark Twain was a writer, a natural-born storyteller, and a self-taught genius with
00:02:04words, who understood before anyone else that art could be created out of the American language.
00:02:11The genius was for speaking the voice of America, for internalizing and then flawlessly reproducing
00:02:21the voice of the American people.
00:02:26He wrote as though there had been no literature before him, as though he had discovered the
00:02:32art of telling a story about these folks that inhabit this continent, and that there was no other
00:02:39continent.
00:02:40It was like something that rose up out of the sea and had no history.
00:02:45And he was just telling what he ran into.
00:02:51He made American speech something to be admired.
00:02:55The European language is supposed to be the ideal.
00:03:00But he just, uh, he idealized the American language.
00:03:05And he used the way we talk and turned it into literature.
00:03:15He wrote constantly newspaper stories, poetry, plays, political diatribes, travel pieces, irreverent
00:03:25musings about religion, and a series of autobiographical sketches noted as much, he admitted, for the tall
00:03:32tales they spun as for the truth they told.
00:03:38And he wrote books.
00:03:40Books read by millions.
00:03:42Including the deceptively simple story of a backwards boy and a runaway slave that showed
00:03:49his people a whole new way to think about themselves.
00:03:55books.
00:03:56I think Mark Twain understood that if we were going to be a country, if America was going
00:04:04to be the nation that it started out to be, the problem of race had to be solved.
00:04:10And I think he realized that it wasn't being solved.
00:04:15Mark Twain told the truth.
00:04:17He saw what we were about and was not afraid to deal with things that other people were afraid
00:04:22to deal with.
00:04:26Like the nation he would come to embody, he was always reinventing himself, always restless,
00:04:33always full of contradictions.
00:04:37I am not an American, Mark Twain said.
00:04:40I am the American.
00:04:52I was born the 30th of November, 1835, in the almost invisible village of Florida, Monroe
00:05:03County, Missouri.
00:05:05The village contained a hundred people, and I increased the population by one percent.
00:05:12It is more than many of the best men in history could have done for a town.
00:05:17There is no record of a person doing as much, not even Shakespeare.
00:05:24But I did it for Florida, Missouri.
00:05:27And it shows I could have done it for any place.
00:05:30Even London, I suppose.
00:05:34He was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the sixth of seven children, two months premature,
00:05:42and so thin and sickly, his mother remembered, that I could see no promise in him.
00:05:49But Halley's comet had blazed in the sky the night of his birth, and she clung to the hope
00:05:55that it might be a bright omen for her baby's future.
00:06:01His father, John Clemens, was a merchant, lawyer, and owner of a few slaves, whose chronic financial
00:06:09failures had forced him to start over five times in a dozen years.
00:06:14Sam Clemens would remember that he never saw his father laugh.
00:06:20His mother, Jane, was different.
00:06:23Though a devout and God-fearing Presbyterian, who made sure her children memorized their Bible verses,
00:06:30she loved dancing and music, and delighted in hearing and telling tall tales.
00:06:38In 1839, hard times forced the Clemens family to move once more,
00:06:44this time to a small Mississippi river town called Hannibal.
00:06:50There, Sam Clemens would accumulate a lifetime's worth of memories.
00:06:57In the nearby woods, he and his friends played Indians, pirates, and Robin Hood and his merry men.
00:07:06They explored a deep limestone cave where the corpse of a 14-year-old girl was said to be preserved in a glass cylinder,
00:07:14and where a local ne'er-do-well named Injun Joe once got lost, surviving only on bats.
00:07:23They played hooky, skipped Sunday school, and spent whole days alone on an island in the middle of the river,
00:07:30fishing, smoking corncob pipes, inventing pranks to play on the townspeople.
00:07:37I think that place formed Mark Twain as it has formed almost no other American writer.
00:07:56Through Mark Twain, we see Hannibal as an Eden.
00:08:00We see it as an eternal summer.
00:08:03We see it as a place of woods and hills and that great flowing river and boys in straw hats,
00:08:09fishing and forming friendships, and that certainly was a part of his consciousness.
00:08:15Much to his parents' disappointment, one of Sam's closest boyhood friends was Tom Blankenship,
00:08:22the son of the town drunk, who lived nearby in a wrecked old house.
00:08:29After dark, when Sam heard Tom's secret catcall, he would sneak out the bedroom window to join him in a nighttime of adventures.
00:08:41He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed, but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had.
00:08:49He was the only really independent person, boy or man, in the community.
00:08:55And by consequence, he was tranquilly and continuously happy, and was envied by all the rest of us.
00:09:04But there was an undercurrent to Hannibal, and that undercurrent involved sudden death by drowning in the river,
00:09:18by murderous thugs who walked the streets.
00:09:23And the boy was aware of all of these things.
00:09:27Growing up, Sam Clemens was restless and nervous, and deeply scarred,
00:09:33when first a sister and then a brother died of childhood diseases.
00:09:38He was given to terrifying nightmares and sleepwalking,
00:09:43and occasional fears that a late night thunderstorm was God's warning to him to mend his ways.
00:09:50Every summer, Sam spent several weeks on his uncle's nearby farm.
00:10:00There, he and his cousins gathered in the evening in the cabin of an old slave they all called Uncle Daniel,
00:10:08who thrilled them with ghost stories and introduced them to spirituals and jubilees.
00:10:15I think that race was always a factor in his consciousness,
00:10:22partly because black people and black voices were the norm for him,
00:10:28before he understood there were differences.
00:10:31They were the first voices of his youth, and the most powerful,
00:10:40the most metaphorical, the most vivid, storytelling voices of his early childhood.
00:10:47Uncle Daniel and Aunt Hannah, who was rumored to be a thousand years old,
00:10:52and was a confidant of Moses.
00:10:55These were towering personalities to him.
00:10:59In my schoolboy days, I had no aversion to slavery.
00:11:07I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it.
00:11:13The local papers said nothing against it.
00:11:16The local pulpit taught us that God approved it,
00:11:20that it was a holy thing,
00:11:22and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind.
00:11:28And then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure.
00:11:32If the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery,
00:11:39they were wise and said nothing.
00:11:42One of his most lasting childhood memories was of a dozen men and women chained together,
00:11:57waiting to be shipped downriver to the slave market.
00:12:02They had, he said, the saddest faces I ever saw.
00:12:12In 1847, John Marshall Clemens was caught in a sleet storm, developed pneumonia, and on March 24th, died.
00:12:22To help his family get by, Sam had to leave school and go to work as a printer's apprentice.
00:12:31At 14, he got a job at a brand new paper in town, the Hannibal Journal.
00:12:37His boss was his older brother, Orion, who had inherited his father's gift for financial failure.
00:12:44Over the course of two years, Orion never once paid his brother the three and a half dollars a week he had promised.
00:12:52Orion was a shlemiel, but he did, in his bumbling, lure Sammy into the world of words and ideas.
00:13:02Becoming a printer's apprentice gave him an almost tactile possession of words.
00:13:08He could now lay his hands on those letters, and he could set the words in type, and he could feel the words.
00:13:16Sam made the most of the experience.
00:13:19He read everything he could find, Shakespeare and the Bible, histories and novels, newspapers from everywhere.
00:13:27And he now began to write occasional light verse, and humorous sketches, under the pseudonym of W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab.
00:13:37Anything he later said, to make the paper lively.
00:13:42Hannibal Journal, May 6th, 1853.
00:13:46Terrible accident.
00:13:49Five hundred men killed and missing.
00:13:53We had set the above head up, expecting, of course, to use it.
00:13:58But as the accident hasn't happened yet, we'll say, to be continued.
00:14:09By the time Sam was 17, Hannibal seemed too confining.
00:14:14After solemnly promising his mother not to drink or gamble, he packed his bags and set off down the river to make a name for himself.
00:14:24It was the beginning of a lifetime of wandering.
00:14:27He set type in St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Keokuk, Iowa, and Cincinnati, where he also wrote humorous articles, at five dollars each, under the pen name, Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass.
00:14:44None of it satisfied him.
00:14:47In the spring of 1857, he boarded a steamboat called the Paul Jones, bound for New Orleans, with the grand ambition of going on to Brazil to make his fortune trading in coca plants.
00:15:02But on his way down the river, an old dream was reawakened.
00:15:09When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village.
00:15:21That was to be a steamboatman.
00:15:24We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient.
00:15:31When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns.
00:15:37The first Negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life.
00:15:43Now and then, we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.
00:15:52These ambitions faded out, each in its turn.
00:15:56But the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.
00:16:13By the time Sam Clemens reached New Orleans, he had convinced the pilot of the Paul Jones to take him on as an apprentice, in exchange for the first $500 of his wages.
00:16:29Sam soon realized just how difficult the job was.
00:16:33A riverboat pilot needed to commit to memory every landmark on both sides of the big river, 1,200 twisting miles from New Orleans to St. Louis.
00:16:44Know the difference between riffles on the water surface caused by wind and those created by dangerous reefs.
00:16:51Learn to note the changing depths at every crucial spot where the leadsmen dropped their knotted rope lines and sang out their measurements.
00:17:00Quarter twain, quarter twain, half twain, and the most pleasant sound of all to a pilot, mark twain, meaning two fathoms or twelve feet, safe water.
00:17:17A pilot had to digest all this information and then be able to apply it, day and night, in clear weather and impenetrable fog.
00:17:27The face of the water in time became a wonderful book.
00:17:34A book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice.
00:17:49And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.
00:17:59Throughout the long 1,200 miles, there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread and lost, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing.
00:18:18In truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it, painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds.
00:18:33Whereas to the trained eye, these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead earnest of reading matter.
00:18:46In the spring of 1858, Sam, now a cub pilot on the Sidewheeler, Pennsylvania, persuaded his younger brother Henry to join the crew as a clerk.
00:19:01The two brothers had always been close, and Sam was grateful for Henry's companionship, happy to have launched him on a career.
00:19:13But Sam got into a quarrel with the Pennsylvania's pilot and was transferred to another boat in New Orleans.
00:19:21The brothers agreed to meet at their sister's house in St. Louis, and Henry set out upriver on the Pennsylvania.
00:19:29Sam followed two days later on another boat.
00:19:37At Greenville, Mississippi, someone from shore shouted to Sam's boat that the Pennsylvania's boilers had blown up and she had gone down near Memphis.
00:19:50In Arkansas, Sam was relieved when he got a newspaper that listed Henry among the uninjured.
00:19:56But then Sam began seeing corpses bobbing in the water.
00:20:01And farther upriver, another paper reported that Henry had been hurt.
00:20:07When he finally arrived in Memphis and rushed to the makeshift hospital, he found his brother still alive, but badly burned and not expected to survive.
00:20:19Memphis, Tennessee, Friday, June 18th, 1858.
00:20:30The horrors of three days have swept over me.
00:20:33They have blasted my youth and left me an old man before my time.
00:20:40For 48 hours I labored at the bedside of my poor, burned and bruised, but uncomplaining brother.
00:20:47Long before this reaches you, my poor Henry will have finished his blameless career.
00:20:58And the light of my life will have gone out in utter darkness.
00:21:02On June 21st, Henry Clemens, just 19 years old, died.
00:21:13Sam blamed himself for having lured Henry onto the river in the first place.
00:21:19And especially for not being there when his little brother had needed him most.
00:21:25Henry Clemens's death was the culminating sorrow of his boyhood.
00:21:31And I think it annealed a great sorrow in him and a great sense of remorse that he never lost.
00:21:38He seemed to believe himself in some way responsible for all of the sorrows around him,
00:21:44and that's a feeling that persisted into old age.
00:21:46But he also had recourse to a way of repairing this sorrow, and that was through humor.
00:21:56He once wrote that the source of all humor is not laughter but sorrow.
00:22:01He said there is no laughter in heaven.
00:22:04In the spring of 1859, a year after Henry's death, Samuel Clemens received his official riverboat pilot's certificate.
00:22:20He soon began earning $250 a month, as much, he liked to point out, as the vice president of the United States.
00:22:28A pilot in those days was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.
00:22:43His movements were free.
00:22:46He consulted no one.
00:22:48He received commands from nobody.
00:22:51So here was the novelty of a king without a keeper.
00:22:58An absolute monarch who was absolute in sober truth, and not by a fiction of words.
00:23:08Nearly 1,000 steamboats were churning up and down the Mississippi and its tributaries,
00:23:13carrying more cargo than all the nation's ocean-going vessels combined.
00:23:17Sam served on at least 19 of them, including the White Cloud and the Crescent City,
00:23:25the Arago, the Alex Scott, the City of Memphis, and the John J. Rowe.
00:23:32For a long time I was on a boat that was so slow we used to forget what year it was we left port in.
00:23:41Ferry boats used to lose valuable trips because their passengers grew old and died waiting for us to get by.
00:23:52This boat, the John J. Rowe, was dismally slow.
00:23:58Still, we often had pretty exciting times, racing with islands and such things.
00:24:05His time on the river was his schooling, Sam said later, in which I got personally acquainted with about all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history.
00:24:24Everywhere he went, he stored up memories of places, scenes, and people.
00:24:33He was an enormous noticer.
00:24:42He was a prodigious noticer.
00:24:46He was always noticing whether people had their hands in their pockets or not, or what was in their pockets.
00:24:54He was noticing manners of dress, the way people held themselves.
00:25:04He was noticing affects and pretenses.
00:25:08And this same fascination with noticing, which I think came from those early childhood nights on the farm,
00:25:14noticing the nuances of the slave songs and the folk tales.
00:25:20That same noticing transferred itself to absorbing the river.
00:25:29The Mississippi became, for Mark Twain, his Harvard and his Yale, the way that Melville says the whaling boat was his Harvard and his Yale.
00:25:39He announced that every character he had ever written, created in his literature, he had met on the Mississippi River.
00:25:48Sam Clements assumed he would live out his days as a pilot and die at the wheel, he said, when my mission was ended.
00:25:56But on April 12th, 1861, the Civil War began, and all commercial traffic on the Mississippi stopped.
00:26:10The Clements family was divided.
00:26:13Sam's mother made no secret of her hatred of Yankees.
00:26:17But his brother, Orion, had become a Republican and had campaigned for Abraham Lincoln.
00:26:22Sam just hoped that the war would be over soon, so that he could return to the river.
00:26:29When several childhood friends helped form a Confederate militia company called the Marion Rangers, Sam signed on too, simply for something to do.
00:26:40But after two weeks spent hiding in the woods from even the rumor of approaching Union troops, the Marion Rangers disbanded.
00:26:51Most of Sam's friends enlisted in the regular Confederate Army. Sam did not. He skedaddled.
00:26:59When I retired from the rebel army in 61, I retired in good order.
00:27:10It seemed to me that for a first attempt at a retreat, it was not badly done.
00:27:16I had done no advancing in all that campaign that was at all equal to it.
00:27:21Meanwhile, President Lincoln had rewarded Orion for his support by appointing him Secretary of the Brand New Territory of Nevada.
00:27:33Sam, now 25 years old, begged his brother to take him along.
00:27:39Others could go to war. Sam Clements was going west.
00:27:44We jumped into the stage. The driver cracked his whip and we bowled away and left the states behind us.
00:28:05There was a freshness and breeziness and an exhilarating sense of emancipation.
00:28:15On July 26, 1861, the Clements brothers left St. Joseph, Missouri on the Central Overland and Pikes Peak Express Company stagecoach.
00:28:25Sam brought along his pipes, five pounds of tobacco, and a pistol, he said, that had only one fault.
00:28:33You could not hit anything with it.
00:28:36They crossed Kansas, then Nebraska, stopping every 10 to 15 miles to change horses at station houses made of salt.
00:28:45It was the first time, Sam noted, we had ever seen a man's front yard on top of his house.
00:28:55On warm days, he perched on top of the stagecoach, clothed only in his underwear, drinking in the fresh air and admiring the endless empty spaces.
00:29:06It was a comfort to sit up and contemplate the majestic panorama of mountains and valleys spread out below us,
00:29:19and eat ham and hard-boiled eggs while our spiritual natures reveled alternately in rainbows, thunderstorms, and peerless sunsets.
00:29:28Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs.
00:29:33Ham and eggs, and after these, a pipe, an old, rank, delicious pipe.
00:29:40Ham and eggs, and scenery, a downgrade, a flying coach, a fragrant pipe, and a contented heart.
00:29:48These make happiness.
00:29:51It's what all the ages have struggled for.
00:29:58Three weeks after leaving Missouri, they pulled into Carson City, the raw new settlement that was the capital of Nevada territory.
00:30:08But as Orion started his job as territorial secretary, Sam realized that being secretary to the secretary carried with it no duties and no pay.
00:30:19He decided to try his hand at gold and silver mining, along with the thousands of other men who had flooded into Nevada on the promise of easy riches.
00:30:31He was a complete failure.
00:30:35My dear mother, the country is fabulously rich in gold, silver, copper, lead, coal, iron, quicksilver, thieves, murderers, desperados, lawyers, Christians, Indians, Chinamans, Spaniards, gamblers, sharpers, coyotes, poets, preachers, and jackass rabbits.
00:30:57In September 1862, he gave up mining and moved to Virginia City, a Nevada boomtown built atop the Comstock Lode, the richest body of silver ore ever discovered in America.
00:31:12Virginia City was also the home of the territorial enterprise, the most read newspaper between Chicago and San Francisco.
00:31:23Its editor offered Sam a job covering local events at $25 a week.
00:31:29Clemens loved the reporter's life.
00:31:34He haunted saloons, theaters, whorehouses.
00:31:37He drank, smoked, played cards and billiards with other newsmen late into the night.
00:31:43Going West brought him accidentally into the company of a great proto-psychedelic counterculture newspaper society out west in Nevada.
00:31:59A bunch of talented wild men improvising a whole new newspaper art form with tall tales and lies and hoaxes and great writing.
00:32:10With his new career underway, Sam Clemens decided to take on a new name, one that would stick with him the rest of his life and eventually become the most celebrated in all of American literature.
00:32:25On February 3rd, 1863, at the end of a dispatch written from Carson City to the territorial enterprise, he signed himself Mark Twain.
00:32:40There's a lot of ambiguity in that.
00:32:45Two fathoms, Mark Twain is the point at which dangerous water becomes safe water, or the point at which safe water becomes dangerous water.
00:32:54And I think Mark Twain was always on that margin.
00:32:57That's where he lived, on the edge between the lightness and the dark, between safety and danger, but always on the flow of the river.
00:33:03In the spring of 1864, Sam Clemens thought it best to leave Virginia City.
00:33:12After being challenged to a duel he was sure he'd lose, he moved on to what he called the most cordial and sociable city in the Union, San Francisco.
00:33:21After the sagebrush and alkali deserts of Nevada, San Francisco was paradise to me.
00:33:32I lived at the best hotel, exhibited my clothes in the most conspicuous places, infested the opera.
00:33:41I attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born bow, and polka'd with a step peculiar to myself.
00:33:55And the kangaroo, Mark Twain.
00:33:58He went to work for The Morning Call, at 40 hours a week, and wrote occasional pieces for a literary journal, The Golden Era.
00:34:07He was soon carousing with San Francisco's leading writers and intellectuals, Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller, and Bret Hart.
00:34:18But he began having trouble with his editor.
00:34:21When Twain wrote an article denouncing white violence towards Chinese immigrants, the paper wouldn't run it.
00:34:26He attacked brutality and corruption in the San Francisco Police Department.
00:34:31And when that story was also killed, he sent it to his old newspaper, The Territorial Enterprise, where its publication resulted in a libel suit.
00:34:40Once, he was jailed for public drunkenness.
00:34:44In October of 1864, his editor quietly let him go.
00:34:49For two months, my sole occupation was avoiding acquaintances, for during that time I did not earn a penny, or buy an article of any kind, or pay my board.
00:35:05I became very adept at slinking.
00:35:10I slunk from back street to back street.
00:35:15I slunk away from approaching faces that looked familiar.
00:35:19And at midnight, after wanderings that were but slinkings away from cheerfulness and light, I slunk to my bed.
00:35:28I felt meaner and lowlier and more despicable than the worms.
00:35:35During all this time, I had but one piece of money.
00:35:41A silver ten-cent piece.
00:35:42And I held to it, and would not spend it on any account, lest the consciousness coming strong upon me, that I was entirely penniless, might suggest suicide.
00:35:56Nothing seemed to work out for him.
00:36:04One day, he put a revolver to his head and almost pulled the trigger.
00:36:09Many times I have been sorry I did not succeed, he wrote years later.
00:36:13But I was never ashamed of having tried.
00:36:15Then a friend invited Clemens to come and try prospecting again, in the Sierra foothills.
00:36:27He did a little mining, but spent most of the next three months huddled inside against the winter rains.
00:36:33Sitting near the stove at a place called Angel's Camp in Calaveras County, he listened intently as a man named Ben Coon told an old story about a gambler who would bet on anything, even his jumping frog.
00:36:51Twain recast the simple story into a much more elaborate and comic tale, and in 1865 sent it east to the most popular humorist in America, Artemis Ward, to see what he thought of it.
00:37:07Ward liked it, and passed the story along to a friend who published it in the New York Saturday Press.
00:37:13Up and down the East Coast, all across the Midwest, other newspapers reprinted it, and he got his very first good review.
00:37:24The foremost among the merry gentlemen of the California press is one who signs himself Mark Twain.
00:37:31Perhaps, if he will husband his resources and not kill with overwork the mental goose that has given us these golden eggs, he may one day rank among the brightest of our wits.
00:37:45The New York Roundtable.
00:37:50In early 1866, Mark Twain landed a plum assignment, writing about Hawaii for the Sacramento Union.
00:37:58It was his first glimpse of the world beyond America, and he loved it.
00:38:05Hawaii, he wrote, is the land of happy contentment, the only supremely delightful place on earth.
00:38:12At noon, I observed a bevy of nude, native young ladies bathing in the sea, and went and sat down on their clothes to keep them from being stolen.
00:38:25I begged them to come out, for the sea was rising, and I was satisfied that they were running some risk.
00:38:35But they were not afraid, and presently went on with their sport.
00:38:39Twain toured Oahu by horse, visited the sugar plantations of Maui, hiked across the volcanic crater of Mount Kilauea, and gently lampooned American missionaries' efforts to convert the islanders.
00:38:54How sad it is, he wrote, to think of the multitudes who have gone to their graves on this beautiful island, and never knew there was a hell.
00:39:08His reports delighted readers all over California, and when he got back to San Francisco, a friend suggested he make the most of it by turning his articles into lectures.
00:39:18Twain was reluctant at first. The prospect of failing before a live audience terrified him. But he borrowed $50 to rent the Academy of Music on Pine Street, and another $150 to print advertisements that were soon showing up all over San Francisco.
00:39:38Mark Twain, Honolulu correspondent of the Sacramento Union, will deliver a lecture on the Sandwich Islands.
00:39:49A splendid orchestra is in town, but has not been engaged.
00:39:54Also, a den of ferocious wild beasts will be on exhibition in the next block.
00:40:01Magnificent fireworks. We're in contemplation for this occasion, but the idea has been abandoned.
00:40:09A grand torchlight procession. May be expected. In fact, the public are privileged to expect whatever they please.
00:40:19Doors open at 7 o'clock. The trouble to begin at 8.
00:40:23Twain got to the empty theater early. He was so nervous, he sat backstage in the dark for an hour and a half, contemplating his impending failure.
00:40:36Before I well knew what I was about, I was in the middle of the stage, bewildered by the fierce glare of the lights, and quaking in every limb with a terror that seemed like to take my life away.
00:40:52The house was full, aisles and all. The tumult in my heart and brain and legs continued a full minute before I could gain any command over myself.
00:41:05Then, little by little, my fright melted away, and I began to talk.
00:41:12He spoke for a little over an hour to a crowd that was mesmerized by his powers of description and convulsed by his deadpan humor.
00:41:24How sad it is to think of the multitudes who have gone to their graves in this beautiful island and never knew there was a hell.
00:41:32The evening was a triumph, earning Twain $400, more than he had earned in a month as a riverboat pilot.
00:41:43Soon he was repeating his performance all across Northern California and Western Nevada.
00:41:51He was an unintentional genius of the stage.
00:41:54He had this shambling gait, and he had this bewildering drawl. His mother called it Sammy's Long Talk.
00:42:03Some people thought he was drunk when he wandered out on stage and kind of mumbled about like this.
00:42:10But as the act went on, as the lecture went on, they began to see that the pauses were the great formulations.
00:42:18The pauses were the great preludes to the cascade of humor.
00:42:22So the silence on stage led to something else.
00:42:25And as he started to understand that himself, he developed it into a great art form.
00:42:30He understood the pause.
00:42:32And one night, he decided to take it as far as it would go.
00:42:35He walked out on stage and looked at the audience, and looked at the audience, and looked at the audience.
00:42:42And the silence went on, the tension built, until someone in the crowd snickered.
00:42:51And when that happened, the cascades of laughter came, and he knew that the audience was his.
00:42:57On June 8th, 1867, the steamship Quaker City set sail from New York.
00:43:15It represented something entirely new.
00:43:19The very first full-scale pleasure cruise.
00:43:22A five-month voyage to the Holy Land and the major ports of the Mediterranean.
00:43:27Most of the 70 passengers aboard were middle-class Midwesterners.
00:43:33Prosperous, Protestant, and so pious that one asked the captain if the ship could halt its progress in mid-ocean in honor of the Sabbath.
00:43:42One passenger, however, seemed unlike the rest.
00:43:47Mark Twain's $1,250 passage had been paid by the Alta California and two New York papers that had promised $20 a letter for regular reports on the Holy Land tour.
00:44:00Twain was eager to see the old world, but bemused by his fellow passengers.
00:44:05There was a little difference of opinion between us, nothing more.
00:44:12They thought they could have saved Sodom and Gomorrah.
00:44:16And I thought it would have been unwise to risk money upon it.
00:44:20He did his best to fit in, joining nightly readings from guidebooks, playing shuffleboard on deck, taking part in debates for which he suggested topics of his own, such as,
00:44:33is a tale absolutely necessary to the comfort and convenience of a dog.
00:44:39He even attended regular prayer services, adding his voice to the choir.
00:44:44But he still preferred late evenings in his cabin, drinking, smoking, swearing, and playing cards with a handful of other men who called themselves the Quaker City Nighthawks.
00:44:56We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries so that we can show off and astonish people when we get home.
00:45:12We wish to excite the envy of our own untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off.
00:45:22The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad.
00:45:32I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass.
00:45:43He's not the first American writer to travel to Europe and the Middle East and report back.
00:45:54But he's the first one who travels abroad and travels as though America were the center of the universe.
00:46:02Up until that point, writers traveled abroad to go to the center of the universe.
00:46:06But Twain is the first one who takes the center with him.
00:46:11Twain saw it all, Gibraltar, Tangiers, Marseille, and a side trip to Paris, where he went to see young women dance the can-can.
00:46:22I placed my hands before my face for very shame, he told his readers, but I looked through my fingers.
00:46:31Then it was on to Italy, where he poked fun at everything.
00:46:35I used to worship the mighty genius of Michelangelo, but I do not want Michelangelo for breakfast, for luncheon, for dinner, for tea, for supper, for between meals.
00:46:50I like a change occasionally.
00:46:52In Genoa, he designed everything.
00:46:57In Florence, he painted everything.
00:47:01In Pisa, he designed everything but the old shot tower.
00:47:06And they would have attributed that to him, if it had not been so awfully out of the perpendicular.
00:47:12On September 10th, the tour reached Beirut, where Twain and seven companions decided their pilgrimage to the Holy Land would be more memorable if they proceeded by a pack train.
00:47:28In Syria, at the headwaters of the Jordan, a camel took charge of my overcoat while the tents were being pitched, and examined it with a critical eye, all over, with as much interest as if he had an idea of getting one made like it.
00:47:46And then, after he was done figuring on it as an article of apparel, he began to contemplate it as an article of diet.
00:47:55He put his foot on it, and lifted one of the sleeves out with his teeth, and chewed and chewed at it, gradually taking it in, and all the while opening and closing his eyes in a kind of religious ecstasy, as if he had never tasted anything as good as an overcoat before in his life.
00:48:16Then, my newspaper correspondence dropped out, and he took a chance in that, but he was treading on dangerous ground now.
00:48:27He began to come across solid wisdom in those documents that was rather weighty on his stomach, and occasionally he would take a joke that would shake him up till it loosened his teeth.
00:48:40It was getting to be perilous times with him, but he held his grip with good courage, till at last he began to stumble on statements that not even a camel would swallow with impunity.
00:48:54He began to gag and gasp, and his eyes to stand out, and his forelegs to spread, and in about a quarter of a minute, he fell over as stiff as a carpenter's workbench, and died a death of indescribable agony.
00:49:13I went and pulled the manuscript out of his mouth, and found that the sensitive creature had choked to death on one of the mildest and gentlest statements of fact I ever laid before a trusting public.
00:49:28Mark Lane.
00:49:30In Palestine, they visited Nazareth and the Dead Sea, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem.
00:49:38For his readers back home, he pointed out that while it took Moses forty years to cross the desert from Egypt to the Promised Land, the Overland stage could have done it in thirty-six hours.
00:49:51And when a boatman charged eight dollars for a short sail on the Sea of Galilee, Twain asked, do you wonder now that Christ walked?
00:50:01In October of 1867, the tour came to an end, and the Quaker city set sail for America, where Mark Twain hoped to continue lecturing and turn his dispatches into a book.
00:50:16I want a good wife.
00:50:28I want a couple of them if they are particularly good.
00:50:32If I were settled, I would quit all nonsense and swindle some poor girl into marrying me.
00:50:38But I wouldn't expect to be worthy of her.
00:50:42I wouldn't have a girl that I was worthy of.
00:50:45She wouldn't do.
00:50:47She wouldn't be respectable enough.
00:50:57In the summer of 1868, Clemens traveled to Elmira, New York, to visit the home of a friend from the Quaker City tour, Charlie Langdon.
00:51:06Everything about the Langdons impressed Clemens.
00:51:10Charlie's father, Jervis Langdon, had made himself a millionaire by cornering the local coal business during the Civil War.
00:51:18But Langdon was as principled as he was prosperous.
00:51:22Before the war, he had been a conductor on the Underground Railroad.
00:51:27When Frederick Douglass passed through New York State in flight from his master, the Langdons offered him shelter in their home.
00:51:34Clemens had never met anyone like the Langdons.
00:51:39But the member of the family he was drawn to the most was their 22-year-old daughter, Olivia.
00:51:46A highly religious, frail, and serious-minded young woman.
00:51:53Livy is the best girl in all the world, and the most sensible.
00:51:58She is the sweetest, and the gentlest, and the daintiest, and the most modest and unpretentious, and the wisest in all things she should be wise in, and the most ignorant in all matters it would not grace her to know.
00:52:16Sam Clemens had never wanted anything so much as he now wanted to marry Livy.
00:52:22I take as much pride in her brains, he wrote a friend, as in her beauty.
00:52:27And just a few days after he got to Elmira, he impetuously proposed.
00:52:33She gently turned him away, but she agreed that they could write to one another as brother and sister.
00:52:40Clemens began writing to her the very next day, and did not stop for 17 months.
00:52:48184 letters, each carefully numbered by Livy, who was slowly but surely falling in love with him.
00:53:00When the Langdons invited him back for Thanksgiving, Clemens took the opportunity formally to ask Jervis Langdon for his daughter's hand.
00:53:08The Langdons were stunned, but gave their conditional approval, provided that he could supply them with the names of friends out west who could attest to his character.
00:53:20His friends did not help his cause.
00:53:24They said with one accord that I got drunk oftener than was necessary.
00:53:29And that I was wild and godless, idle, lecherous, and a discontented and an unsettled rover.
00:53:37And they could not recommend any girl of high character and social position to marry me.
00:53:43But as I had already said all that about myself beforehand, there was nothing shocking or surprising about it to the family.
00:53:51Despite the dubious character references, Jervis Langdon had grown to like Clemens, and he finally gave his blessing to the engagement.
00:54:02I am so happy, Clemens wrote to a friend.
00:54:05I want to scalp somebody.
00:54:07Meanwhile, Livy set out to reform her fiancé.
00:54:14As he continued to lecture and wait impatiently for his book about the Quaker City tour to be published, she sent him copies of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher's weekly sermons, which, he said, he read over and over again.
00:54:28He vowed to become a Christian, to stop swearing, to abandon even the social drinking she had reluctantly agreed to permit him.
00:54:37I do not know of anything I could refuse to do if you wanted it done.
00:54:43I am reasonably afraid that you'll stop me from smoking someday.
00:54:48But if ever you do, you will do it with such happy grace that I shall be swindled into the notion that I didn't want to smoke anymore anyhow.
00:54:58In July of 1869, Mark Twain's The Innocence Abroad appeared at last.
00:55:07It would sell 100,000 copies in the next two years.
00:55:11Only Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin had sold more in so little time.
00:55:17The former printer's apprentice had become the best-selling author in America.
00:55:22Innocence Abroad was a subscription book sold door to door by an army of salesmen who took orders from people who rarely visited bookstores.
00:55:33Tradesmen, shopkeepers, farmers living miles from town.
00:55:38He told a critic, I never tried to cultivate the cultivated classes.
00:55:44I always went for bigger game, the masses.
00:55:47And he got them.
00:55:49He wrote in his journal,
00:55:52Great books are wine.
00:55:54My books are water.
00:55:57And then you can almost hear the pause and see the wink, but everybody drinks water.
00:56:04Literary critics rarely bothered even to review subscription books.
00:56:08But Twain could not have been more pleased when his book was praised by the eminent William Dean Howells,
00:56:14an editor of the prestigious journal, The Atlantic Monthly.
00:56:18The two men would become close friends.
00:56:21With his wedding day approaching, Twain went right to work on a new book,
00:56:26an account of his own youthful adventures in the West, called Roughing It.
00:56:31And his publisher now began promoting him as the people's author.
00:56:36Samuel Clemens and Livy Langdon were married in her father's parlor on February 2nd, 1870.
00:56:48The wedding party boarded a private railroad car for Buffalo, where, thanks to a loan from his father-in-law,
00:56:54Clemens was now part owner of a newspaper, the Buffalo Express.
00:56:59Then Jervis Langdon stunned his new son-in-law by presenting him with a handsome home,
00:57:05completely furnished and staffed with a cook, housemaid, and coachman,
00:57:11whose uniform, Clemens said, cost more than any suit of clothes he'd ever owned.
00:57:16He could not believe his luck.
00:57:21Behold, I have at the moment the only sweetheart I ever loved.
00:57:26And bless her old heart, she is lying asleep upstairs in a bed I sleep in every night.
00:57:33And for four whole days, she has been Mrs. Samuel L. Clemens.
00:57:42We are two as happy people as you ever saw, Livy wrote.
00:57:46Our days seem to be made up of only bright sunlight, with no shadow in them.
00:57:54But that summer, Jervis Langdon died of stomach cancer.
00:57:58Livy, now pregnant, suffered a nervous collapse.
00:58:02Her closest friend came to care for her, and died of typhoid fever in the Clemens' own bed.
00:58:11In November, she gave birth prematurely to a son.
00:58:15They named him Langdon after her father.
00:58:19The baby weighed just four pounds at birth, and remained sickly.
00:58:24Slow to teeth, to walk, to talk.
00:58:27Was plagued by frequent coughs and colds.
00:58:30A constant source of worry for his doting parents.
00:58:36In 1871, Clemens decided to leave Buffalo and start over.
00:58:42He put up for sale both his house and his interest in the Buffalo Express, and moved to the most prosperous city in America, Hartford, Connecticut.
00:58:55Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see, Hartford is the chief.
00:59:01It is a city of 40,000 inhabitants, and seems to be composed almost entirely of dwelling houses, scattered along the broad straight streets.
00:59:11Everywhere the eye turns, it is blessed with a vision of refreshing green.
00:59:17You do not know what beauty is, if you have not been here.
00:59:23The editor Charles Dudley Warner lived in Hartford.
00:59:26So did Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as her suffragist sister Isabella Beecher Hooker,
00:59:32whose house Sam and Livy rented till they could begin to build one of their own.
00:59:41In March of 1872, their second child, Olivia Susan Clemens, was born.
00:59:47Unlike Langdon, she was healthy.
00:59:50A five-pounder, Clemens told friends, as fat as butter and wholly free from infelicities of any kind.
00:59:57He and Livy would call her Susie.
01:00:03But just nine weeks after her birth, tragedy struck again.
01:00:08Nineteen-month-old Langdon contracted diphtheria and died in his mother's arms.
01:00:13Just as he had blamed himself for the death of his brother Henry,
01:00:18Clemens held himself responsible for his son's death.
01:00:21He claimed he had carelessly allowed him to become chilled during a carriage ride.
01:00:26Livy was devastated.
01:00:31I feel so often as if my path is to be lined with graves, she wrote.
01:00:36She said she now felt almost perfectly cold toward God,
01:00:40and no longer went regularly to church.
01:00:44Clemens would come to blame himself for that, too.
01:00:50If he were merely the stand-up comic of his time,
01:00:54the Artemis Ward, the man in search of an easy laugh,
01:00:59he wouldn't have been a very good writer.
01:01:03But his exuberant and almost irrepressible humor
01:01:07is always colored by this understanding
01:01:10that life is not just one big yuck,
01:01:13but is a serious event in which horrible things happen.
01:01:18I think that he had perhaps a dark, depressive streak,
01:01:26which is not uncommon among writers,
01:01:31and that this was the element in his personality
01:01:37that balanced off this need to be amusing and entertaining,
01:01:43and gave depth to his work.
01:01:46And I would love to say,
01:01:47I love you.
01:01:49I love you.
01:01:50If you have noticed that,
01:01:51I fell into the corner of my head and diciendo,
01:01:53you're not even gonna die.
01:01:55You can go on the other side.
01:01:56I know that I'm not gonna die.
01:01:57I just went on to the right.
01:01:58But the next step of my head is he is he.
01:02:00I'm not going to die.
01:02:02I don't know.
01:02:03I don't know him.
01:02:04I don't know him.
01:02:05I'm not doing it.
01:02:06But that he is very much bigger.
01:02:07But that's a very small habitat.
01:02:09I don't know that it's just really good.
01:02:11But then we just love him.
01:02:12And I don't think that the people
Comments