Questions to ask Mark Twain

Samuel Clemens in brief

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, on 30 November 1835 and grew up in the river town of Hannibal. He died at his house in Redding, Connecticut, on 21 April 1910. In between he was a printer, a steamboat pilot, a failed silver miner, a newspaper reporter in Nevada and California, a world-famous lecturer, a publisher and, for most of his adult life, a writer of books that sold by subscription door to door.

He first signed himself Mark Twain in February 1863 in the Territorial Enterprise of Virginia City, Nevada. The phrase is a riverboat call meaning two fathoms, twelve feet of water: just deep enough to be safe.

For an interview, the Twain of 1885 is a good choice: 49, living in Hartford with his wife Olivia and three daughters, publishing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant through his own firm. That Twain does not yet know about his bankruptcy or the deaths of his daughter Susy and his wife.

Before you quote him, check the quote

Twain is the most misquoted writer in America. Lines such as the one about “the two most important days in your life” or being more disappointed “twenty years from now” have no known source in anything he wrote. Even his most famous joke is usually garbled. When a newspaper reported in 1897 that he was ill or dead, what he wrote was that the report of his death was an exaggeration, not the longer line people repeat.

The rule for your project: use a line only if you can find it in his books, speeches, letters or published interviews. The Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley, publishes his letters and the autobiography he dictated, which he ordered held back for a hundred years after his death; volume one appeared in 2010. Our guide on how to check if a quote is real shows the steps.

Questions about Hannibal and the river

What the record says: his father died in 1847, and Sam left school to work as a printer's apprentice. In 1857 he became a cub pilot under Horace Bixby and was licensed in 1859. His younger brother Henry died in June 1858 after the steamboat Pennsylvania exploded; Sam had found him the job. The Civil War closed the river to commercial traffic in 1861. Life on the Mississippi (1883) tells the piloting story.

1. What did a pilot have to memorise to take a steamboat from St Louis to New Orleans?
2. What kind of teacher was Horace Bixby?
3. How much of Tom Sawyer is the Hannibal you grew up in?
4. Do you blame yourself for Henry's death?
5. Enslaved people lived in Hannibal and in your uncle's farm household. What did you understand about slavery as a boy?

Questions about the war and going West

What the record says: in 1861 he spent about two weeks in a Missouri Confederate militia, the Marion Rangers, before quitting. He told the story in 1885 in The Private History of a Campaign That Failed, half comedy and half confession. He then went to Nevada with his brother Orion, tried silver mining, and turned to journalism. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1865) made his name.

1. Why did you join a Confederate militia, and why did you leave?
2. What did you learn as a reporter in Virginia City and San Francisco?
3. Why did you pick a riverboat call as a pen name?

Questions about Huckleberry Finn and race

What the record says: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn came out in Britain in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. In March 1885 the public library of Concord, Massachusetts, removed it as coarse. The book uses the racial slur common in its 1840s Missouri setting more than two hundred times, and it is still argued over in schools. In December 1885 Twain paid the Yale law school costs of a Black student, Warner T. McGuinn, writing to the dean that white Americans owed reparation to Black people for the wrongs done to them.

1. Why did you tell the story in Huck's voice instead of your own?
2. Why does Huck decide he would rather “go to hell” than turn Jim in?
3. What do you say to readers who find the book's language painful?
4. Why did you pay for Warner McGuinn's law school?
5. In 1870 you wrote a scornful essay about Native Americans, The Noble Red Man. Do you still think as you did then?

In a classroom interview the character should talk about the word, not say it.

Questions about money, bankruptcy and the world tour

What the record says: Twain lost a fortune on the Paige typesetting machine, and his publishing firm, Charles L. Webster and Company, failed in 1894. Henry H. Rogers of Standard Oil sorted out his affairs. Although the law did not require it, Twain set out in 1895 on a lecture tour around the world to repay his creditors in full, and described it in Following the Equator (1897).

1. Why did you sink so much money into the typesetting machine?
2. Why repay every creditor when the law said you did not have to?
3. What did you see in India and South Africa on the 1895 to 1896 tour?

Questions about empire, grief and old age

What the record says: from 1901 until his death he was a vice-president of the Anti-Imperialist League. To the Person Sitting in Darkness (North American Review, February 1901) mocks the “Blessings-of-Civilization Trust” and the war in the Philippines; King Leopold's Soliloquy (1905) attacks the Belgian king's rule in the Congo. His daughter Susy died of meningitis in 1896, his wife Olivia in 1904, his daughter Jean on Christmas Eve 1909.

1. Why did a famous humorist risk his popularity attacking the war in the Philippines?
2. What made you write King Leopold's Soliloquy?
3. How did you keep writing after Susy died?
4. You were born the year Halley's Comet appeared. Did you really expect to leave with it?

On the comet: his biographer Albert Bigelow Paine reported that in 1909 Twain said he came in with the comet and expected to go out with it. It returned in 1910, and he died the day after its closest approach to the Sun.

Sample answers he really gave

Question: Should a person try to have no faults at all?

Question: How does it feel to be called a classic author?

Question: Why did you help a Black law student? A sourced answer, in paraphrase: in a letter to Dean Francis Wayland of 24 December 1885 he wrote that white Americans owed reparation for the wrongs done to Black people, and that he was glad to pay part of it.

Question: You were a Confederate soldier. A sourced answer, in paraphrase: in The Private History of a Campaign That Failed (Century Magazine, 1885) he called his two weeks in the militia a comic fiasco, and described how the shooting of a stranger by his company sickened him of war.

What Twain could not have known

• Arguments over Huckleberry Finn in modern schools and library challenges after 1910.
• The internet, and how easily fake quotes in his name now spread.
• Halley's Comet's 1986 return.
• If set in 1885: the bankruptcy of 1894, the world tour, or the deaths of Susy, Olivia and Jean.

He would have opinions about modern copyright, though. He argued for longer copyright terms before Congress in 1906, dressed in white.

Where to find Twain's own words

Project Gutenberg has The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi and Mark Twain's Speeches (1910). Mark Twain Project Online, from the University of California, has his letters and the scholarly edition of the Autobiography. Wikisource has his essays, including To the Person Sitting in Darkness.

If you want to try out your questions by voice before an interview or presentation, Yuga has an AI recreation of Mark Twain, built from his writing and the historical record. It can be wrong, and it is not Twain, so cite the books and letters in your work. He heard Charles Dickens read in New York in 1867; compare our questions to ask Charles Dickens.