by Ron Powers
Uncle Dan’l (slave)
in Gilded Age
Uncle Remus
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe)
Underground Railroad
Ungar Publishing Company
Unidentified Flying Oddball (film)
Union Pacific railroad
Unionville Northern Californian
United States:
“American Nervousness” in
centennial of
China’s Open Door treaty with
culture of
education in
in 1870
Gilded Age avarice in
lecture circuit in
literature of
newspapers in
psychic loneliness of
racism in
religion in
science vogue in
sophistication of
in Spanish-American War
sports in
United States Gazette
“United States of Lyncherdom, The” (Twain)
Updike, John
Utopia (Miller)
Vanderbilt, Cornelius
Van Gogh, Vincent
Vanity Fair
Van Nostrand, John A.
Vatican
Venice, Italy
Verga, Giovanni
Verne, Jules
Vesuvius, Mount
Vicar of Wakefield, The (Goldsmith)
Vicksburg, campaign of
Victoria, Queen of England
Vidal, Gore
Vietnam
Views A-Foot (Taylor)
“Villagers of 1840–3” (Twain)
model for Carpenter family in
model for Carpenter in
Virginia City, Nev.
Menken’s act in
Ward’s lectures in
Virginia City Territorial Enterprise
fire at
SLC offered job by
SLC’s leave from
SLC’s letters to
SLC’s Sanitary Fair hoax in
SLC’s start at
staff imagination at
Virginia City Union
Virginia Daily Union
Virginia House
Vishnu Sarma
von Versen, Mollie Clemens
Wadsworth, Charles
Wagner, Honus
Wagner, Richard
Wakeman, Edgar
Walker, William
Wallace, Lewis
Walt Disney
Ward, Artemus
death of
oratorical style of
SLC compared with
SLC hoaxed by
SLC’s friendship with
SLC’s lecture on
Warner, Charles Dudley
death of
Gilded Age and
Roughing It reviewed by
SLC compared with
Warner, George
Warner, Margaret
Warner, Susan
Gilded Age and
“War Prayer, The” (Twain)
Warramoo, RMS
Washington, Booker T.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, George
Washington Evening Star
Washington Morning Chronicle
Washington Newspaper Correspondents’ Club
Washington Post
Washington Square ( James)
Washoe City, Nev.
SLC’s lecture in
Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (Fishkin)
Watch and Ward ( James)
Watson, Thomas
Wave Hill
Way, Frederick, Jr.
“Ways That Are Dark” (Scharnhorst)
Webb, Charles Henry
Webster, Annie Moffett
Webster, Charles
Webster, Jean
Webster, Samuel Charles
Weekly Review
West:
literature of
SLC’s embrace of
Western Union
Western Whig
Wharton, Edith
“What a Sky-Rocket Did” (Twain)
“What is Man?” (Twain)
Wheeler, Andrew Carpenter, see Crinkle, Nym
Whiskey Ring
Whistler, George Washington
Whistler, James McNeill
White, Frank Marshall
White, Stanford
Whitefriars Club
“White Man’s Burden, The” (Kipling)
Whitman, Walt
Whitmore, Franklin G.
Whittier, John Greenleaf
Wilde, Oscar
Wilder, Thornton
Wilderness, Battle of the
Wiley, George
Wiley, Margaret
Wilhelm II, Kaiser
Williams, True
Willis, Resa
Wilmington, J. W.
Wilson, Woodrow
Winans, Thomas DeKay
Wingate, Charles
Wister, Owen
Wodehouse, P. G.
Wolf, Jim
Wolfe, Thomas
Wolfe, Tom
“Woman: The Pride of the Professions, and the Jewel of Ours” (Twain)
Woman of Reason, A (Howells)
Woodhull, Victoria
Work, Alanson
Works of Mark Twain, The: Early Tales & Sketches
World War I
Wright, Laura, see Dake, Laura M. Wright
Wright, Marshall P.
Wright, William, see De Quille, Dan
Xenophon
Yanks and Johnnies; or, Laugh and Grow Fat
“Ye Sentimental Law Student” (Twain)
Yonge, Charlotte
You Bet, Nev.
Young, Dave
Young, Reed
Youngblood, William
Young Men’s Christian Association
Zola, Emile
About the Author
Ron Powers is a Pulitzer Prize–and Emmy Award–winning writer and critic. He is the author of ten books and co-author of two, including the New York Times No. 1 best-seller Flags of Our Fathers.
Powers has written for several periodicals, including, most recently, the Atlantic Monthly. He wrote the introduction to The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins for a new Modern Library anthology of Twain’s works, as well as the profile on Mark Twain for the 2004 edition of the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature.
He lives in Middlebury, Vermont.
A transcendent American life unfolded between the making of these two photographs. Samuel Langhorne Clemens was an obscure assistant, not yet eighteen, at his brother Orion’s Hannibal, Missouri, Journal when he sat for this daguerreotype in 1851 or 1852.
The figure known throughout the world as Mark Twain relaxes with his great literary friend and champion William Dean Howells in 1909, a year before his death.
Sam’s uneducated but verbally gifted mother Jane Lampton Clemens in 1858 or 1859. She lived to see her son publish his greatest works—some of them featuring fictionalized versions of her, for instance, as Aunt Polly.
Henry Clemens, Sam’s beloved younger brother, was nineteen when he sat for this photograph in St. Louis. A few weeks later he died a terrible death in a steamboat explosion.
The eldest of the Clemens siblings, Orion, shown here in the early 1860s, shared Sam’s propensity for dreaming, but not a shred of his talent.
Mary E. (Mollie) Stotts married Orion Clemens in 1854, enjoyed fleeting glamour as a society hostess in Carson City when her husband served as Secretary of the Nevada Territory. She followed him back East into obscurity after Orion bungled his promising political career.
Laura Wright was only fourteen when she met the young apprentice-pilot Sam Clemens on a docked steamboat in New Orleans in the spring of 1858. Laura floated through his dreams—and his writings—for the rest of Mark Twain’s life, reemerging dramatically in his later years.
The legendary pilot Horace Bixby succumbed to the entreaties (and
the promise of five hundred dollars) from a drawling young passenger aboard his boat the Paul Jones, bound for New Orleans in February 1857, and launched Sam Clemens’s steamboating career. Mark Twain immortalized Bixby in Life on the Mississippi.
“Floating palaces,” the big side-wheelers were called; and races between them were frequent spectacles on the river. In this Currier & Ives chromolithograph, the Queen of the West is taking on the Morning Star. Such races could end in fiery tragedy, as Sam Clemens discovered in 1858.
A new kind of American cultural figure—the star—materialized in Maguire’s Opera House in San Francisco on October 2, 1866. Mark Twain, desperate for cash and dazed with stage-fright, edged onstage, and delivered a lecture on the Sandwich Islands that quickly turned into a riotous triumph.
In May, 1922, an aging Billy Gillis poses on hallowed ground. The cabin behind Gillis is a restored version of the one that stood on this site atop Jackass Hill in Calaveras County, California, in the mining heyday of the Comstock Lode. During his stay on Jackass Hill, Sam grew absorbed in a local “tall tale” about a certain jumping frog. He wrote his own version several months later.
Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne) was the reigning American humorist when he met the newspaperman Sam Clemens in Virginia City, Nevada, while touring the West in 1863. Sam struck up a friendship with Ward, who later encouraged him to send the “jumping frog” comic sketch back east.
“Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” was published in the New York Saturday Press on November 18, 1865, under the by-line “Mark Twain.” Rapidly reprinted around the country, it gained lasting renown as “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” This 1872 caricature is by Frederick Waddy.
These solemn passengers aboard the Quaker City, photographed by William E. James, en route from America to the Holy Land in 1867, had no way of imagining that the red-haired raconteur in their midst would enshrine them in literature in his groundbreaking travel book, The Innocents Abroad.
Rough seas lashed at the Quaker City on its departure from New York Harbor on June 8. Mark Twain smiled—and took notes—as his elderly fellow voyagers lurched about the decks, hands clasped to stomachs, muttering, “Oh, my!”
Among the few passengers who recognized the budding genius beneath Sam Clemens’s dispatches back to America was Mary Mason Fairbanks, the thirty-nine-year-old wife of a Cleveland newspaper publisher. The two became lifelong friends.
This hand-colored ambrotype of Olivia Langdon was probably made in 1867. It is very likely the image that Clemens, in later life, recalled as an “ivory miniature” shown to him by Olivia’s brother Charlie in Charlies’s shipboard cabin at the Bay of Smyrna. Previously published only once, and here identified as that historic image for the first time.
“I feel so often as if my path is to be lined with graves,” Livy Clemens wrote to a friend in 1872. Her face, as shown in this photo (#18) taken around that time, would lose its youthful serenity. In June of that year, the first-born Clemens child, Langdon, had died of diphtheria after surviving for eighteen sickly months.
Healthy daughters soon restored joy to the Clemens household: Susy, born in March 1872, and Clara, born in June 1874.
The ever-restless Sam swept his small family through England, Scotland, and Ireland in 1873. Here, family friend Clara Spaulding holds the baby Susy in her lap, seated next to Livy and Mark. Their Scottish host, John Brown, looks on.
Mark Twain accumulated addresses throughout the United States and Europe in his lifetime. Among the most significant are these: “Stormfield,” in Connecticut (#22). Quarry Farm (#23), on a hill above Elmira, New York. The home of John and Isabella Hooker (#24) in Hartford, Connecticut. The house at 472 Delaware Avenue, in Buffalo (#25), presented to Sam and Livy as a surprise wedding gift from Livy’s father, Jervis Langdon, in February 1870. The octagonal gazebo above Quarry Farm, a gift to Sam from Sue Crane in 1874 (#26). Here, during the summer visits to the farm, Mark Twain wrote much of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, A Tramp Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The gazebo now sits on the campus of Elmira College.
Samuel Clemens sat for this striking portrait by Mathew B. Brady, the great Civil War photographer, in Washington in July 1870.
Judging from the two-toned shoes, Mark Twain may have been aware that a photographer was in the vicinity as he scribbled away inside his Quarry Farm gazebo in the summer of 1874.
Bookish William Dean Howells, shown as a young consul in Venice during the Civil War, was an unlikely champion of the rough-edged Western humorist Mark Twain. Yet it was Howells’s enthusiastic review of The Innocents Abroad in the staid Atlantic Monthly that launched the author into respectability in the East.
An inveterate doodler, Mark Twain was forever dashing off sketches on napkins, in his notebooks and on other available surfaces. This self-portrait was drawn in December 1874.
Elisha Bliss (#32) published The Innocents Abroad over the strong opposition of his American Publishing Company colleagues. The gentle James R. Osgood (#31), encouraged Clemens to return to the Mississippi River, and even accompanied him on the 1882 odyssey that resulted in Life on the Mississippi. Charles L. Webster (#33), a small-town New York civil engineer, came on board a few years after marrying Clemens’s niece, Annie Moffett—but presided over the failure of Mark Twain’s own publishing company, and died at thirty-nine after enduring years of “Uncle Sam’s” vitriol.
Mark Twain’s book illustrators could not resist including his easy-to-capture likeness in many of their drawings, such as this one of Mark Twain leading “Harris” in A Tramp Abroad.
Copyright laws were either lax or nonexistent through most of the 19th century, and no American author was more outraged by pirated editions of his books and plays than Mark Twain. His crusade drew the amused attention of his friend Thomas Nast in this 1882 cartoon for Harper’s Weekly.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Steamboat Pilot: Samuel Clemens in 1858.
The squire of Nook Farm with his daughters and wife at the height of their happiness in Hartford: Clara, Jean, Livy, and Susy clustered around “Papa” in the summer of 1884, just months before the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Sam Clemens was rarely photographed smiling—or naked—but he seems inclined toward both in this whimsical photograph made in 1884.
Sam gets a little nutty with his favorite daughter Susy on the porch of the family’s mountainside cabin in Onteora, New York, in 1890.
Straitened finances forced the Clemenses to live abroad for nearly a decade. In 1895, Mark Twain (#40) embarked on an audacious around-the-world lecture tour by which he intended to repay the creditors of Charles C. Webster & Co. 100 cents on the dollar. Clara and Livy (#41) accompanied him through Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, India, and South Africa, among other ports of call. Lecture receipts and sales of his resulting book, Following the Equator, enabled him to meet his $100,000 goal.
The lecturing triumph quickly dissolved into tragedy, though: just as it ended, in 1896, Clemens learned in England that his beloved daughter Susy had died of spinal meningitis back in Hartford. He never fully recovered from the loss.
The elegant Henry Huttleston Rogers was a feared and ruthless multi-millionaire capitalist of the Gilded Age; but also a man of taste who admired the works of Mark Twain. In 1893, Rogers entered the author’s life, staunched the flow of his bad-investment cash, re-organized his finances, and saved the Clemens family’s estate and literary copyrights.
An enthusiastic shipboard gamesman all his life, Mark Twain (third from left) poses with fellow shuffleboard players aboard the Minneapolis on June 16 1907, en route to England. There the author would receive the honor he treasured above all others, a degree from Oxford.
Clara Clemens, shown here in Florence, became fiercely protective of her father’s posthumous reputation, suppressing his darker writings and evidence of his tempestuous moods.
But her own book, My Father, Mark Twain, includes many unmatchable renderings of his character.
In the spring of 1902, Samuel Clemens visited his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, for the last time. He posed for photographs (#46) in front of the house at 206 Hill Street and verified that he had lived there as a boy in the 1840s. He then traveled on to Columbia, Missouri (#47), where he received an honorary degree from the University of Missouri. In 1903 (#48), Clemens reunited with a hero of his younger days: John T. Lewis, who in 1877 had seized the bit of a runaway carriage-horse at Quarry Hill and saved the lives of three people.
Sam Clemens had learned to play the piano and guitar from his sister Pamela back in Hannibal; he played and sang, mostly spirituals, throughout his life. Here he plays at Stormfield in 1908.
Billiards was another lifelong passion; games at all hours helped slake his loneliness after the deaths of Susy and Livy, and then Jean.
Clara, Livy, and Sam in a revealing photograph made in 1900. A spruced-up Sam addresses the camera while Clara gazes down protectively on her mother, who seems worn and dazed by her life of bereavements and illnesses.
A second office for Clemens in his later years was the bed of carved oak that he and Livy had purchased in Venice for their Hartford house. The bed accompanied him to his late-life residences; he grew fond of working and receiving visitors while propped on pillows.