Birthday of a Great Author

The following is from Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac.

It's the birthday of a writer who described life in the Mississippi River valley, whose most famous fiction and nonfiction is set along the river, and who got his pen name from being a riverboat captain, even though he spent most of his adult life traveling or living on the East Coast. That's Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, born on this day in Florida, Missouri (1835).

The town of Florida was about 30 miles inland from the Mississippi River, and Samuel's father, trained as a lawyer, was finding it impossible to support himself in Florida as a lawyer, or a politician or storekeeper, for that matter. So when Sam was four, his father moved the family to Hannibal, Missouri, right on the river, figuring that he would have better business there.

For a while, Sam had an ordinary childhood, playing with other boys his age, exploring the caves near Hannibal, playing elaborate pranks on fellow townspeople. But when he was 11, his father died, and after fifth grade he never went back to school. He was an apprentice with local printers, including his older brother Orion, who had bought out several of the area's newspapers. When he got tired of working for his brother, he went and worked as a typesetter on the East Coast. But he wasn't very successful.

Like many boys growing up along the Mississippi, Sam had dreamed of being a riverboat pilot, and so when he found himself, at 22 years old, struggling to make a living as a printer, he decided to switch careers entirely and give his childhood dream a try. It was a rigorous job, requiring an 18-month apprenticeship that cost $500 (more than $10,000 today). But he loved life on a riverboat. He said, "A pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth."

And Sam Clemens was good at learning the river, and a very good pilot. He made enough money to pay off his debts, support his mother, and have some money left over to spend in St. Louis and New Orleans, where he learned to drink and dance. He admitted that he found it satisfying to walk around with hundred dollar bills peeking out between his smaller bills to show off to the pilots who didn't think he could ever learn the river as well as he did.

And he might have stayed this way for the rest of his life, a successful steamboat captain enjoying the river and the nightlife of the river cities, if the Civil War had not come along. In the spring of 1861, all the river traffic was stopped, and Sam no longer had a job.

His older brother was given the job of Secretary of the Nevada Territory, and was set to leave that summer. He asked Sam if he would like to travel west with him, and Sam agreed. He got a job writing for a newspaper in Virginia City, Nevada. He wanted to write under a new name, so he chose a riverboat expression: "Mark Twain," a call given when the river is two fathoms deep, about 12 feet, which means it is safe for the average steamboat. And so Mark Twain became a writer.

He lived in California, Europe, New York, and Connecticut, but never again along the Mississippi, although he went back in 1882 in order to do research for a project about life as a riverboat pilot. And he went back to the river again and again in his fiction, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).

[Twain's works are well-known in Korea.  Though an American author, his words speak to the core of the human condition and reveal our deepest needs.]

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