Twain, Mark (1835–1910)

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, before taking his familiar pen name, Mark Twain, began his writing career as a newspaper reporter and traveling correspondent. He achieved national prominence in 1866 when, just 30 years old, he spent 4 months in the Sandwich Islands (now Hawai'i) composing satirically politicized articles for the Sacramento Union; these pieces were reprinted in newspapers across the United States. Among the targets of his commentaries were U.S. businesspeople whose greed fed the annihilation of the islands' native peoples.

Upon returning to the United States, Twain took advantage of his fame by joining the lecture circuit. In one of his most famous speeches, which he continued to deliver for more than 7 years, he described the Sandwich Islands as having a population of about 400,000 prior to U.S. colonization, but after “the white man” arrived with disease and various forms of “civilization,” the population dwindled so as to be only a “few more missionaries” from extinction. During this trip, Twain developed empathy for colonized peoples and the lens through which he critiqued U.S. and European imperialism for the rest of his life.

Twain was born into a working-class family in Florida, Missouri, in 1835. After several moves, the family settled in Hannibal, Missouri, a town on the Mississippi River. Twain, who spent many of his childhood summers with a slave-owning uncle, learned to despise slavery at an early age. He later wrote about the cementing of his anti-slavery sentiments after watching the murder of a black man for, as Twain described, being awkward.

Twain's questioning spirit—a trait he demonstrated even in childhood—and distrust of authority (expressed by primary characters in many of his novels, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) bred in him a passion for justice. This passion emerged from his writing and speeches, through which he advocated for the unprivileged and critiqued the power elite. His advocacy and criticism put Twain at odds with white, upper- and middle-class sentiments of the day.

For example, shortly after returning from the Sandwich Islands, Twain penned a series of articles regarding racism against Chinese immigrants in San Francisco. In another series, he criticized law enforcement for brutality against impoverished citizens and a tendency to overlook crime committed by wealthy citizens. Twain, himself, became a target of police harassment as a result.

Twain composed most of his well-known works between 1869, when he finished The Innocents Abroad, and 1897, when he published Following the Equator. Throughout this time, his work incorporated unapologetic—sometimes revolutionary—political commentary mixed with sarcastic humor, a combination that pointed to the absurdities of colonization, slavery, racism, sexism, classism, and imperialism. Meanwhile, he championed the labor movement and critiqued capitalism and the hypocrisy of oppression in the name of “Christianity.” He even served on the national board of the Anti-Imperialist League, an organization that included Frederick Douglass and Samuel Gompers.

Twain's anti-racist sentiments have been debated since the 1884 publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Some have argued that the novel, along with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, was racist because of graphically racialized language and the characters' exaggerated dialects. At its core, though, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a novel about a poor, uneducated, white boy struggling to make sense out of the absurdities of racism and slavery. Jim, the slave with whom he ran away, became, in essence, a mentor in this process. Ultimately, Huck's inability to make sense of slavery carried a fundamentally anti-racist message. In other projects, Twain was much more direct with this message. In an article titled “The United States of Lyncherdom” he blasted government inaction regarding lynchings, pleading with U.S. missionaries to come home from China and convert Christians.

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