If Henry James’s art was his life, Mark Twain’s life was his art. The streets of Hannibal, the rolling hills where Tom Sawyer’s gang played and the cave in which they got lost, the River, and the steamboats that plied it, all became—no matter how softly tinted and censored—the very tissue of the American imagination, invested with idyllic charm and pastoral beauty.

The real Hannibal belonged less to romance than to the grotesque image of the United States that Faulkner called Yoknapatawpha County, and young Sam Clemens could, when he wanted to, recollect it as it actually was—bloody, homicidal, neurotic, and bonded to the peculiar institution of slavery. In his childhood, death was ever present: death by drowning (in the case of some of his friends), death by lynching, death by disease, death by steamboat explosion (in the case of his younger brother Henry). In 1847 Sam’s life changed radically when his father died. Like Yossarian, the hero of Joseph Heller’s novel, Catch-22, who learned of life’s frailty and uncertainty when he unzipped Snowden’s flight jacket, Sam watched his father’s autopsy through a keyhole and, at age eleven, learned a lesson that all the images—of tiny toes oozing in the Mississippi mud, of communal brushes whitewashing a fence, of a free and easy life on a raft in the middle of the River—could never eradicate.

Sam quit school shortly after his father’s death, became an apprentice to the owner of a Hannibal newspaper, and began the longest initiation into literature in American literary history. After his first stint on the Hannibal Journal, he became the assistant to his bumbling brother Orion, who edited newspapers into bankruptcy all along the Mississippi from Hannibal and Muscatine to Keokuk, starting and moving again, with the same dogged and doomed persistence that marked all of the Clemens family except Sam.

As Orion blighted journalism along the River, Sam managed to do a little writing for his brother and to break loose from the close-knit family bond. In 1853 he traveled as an itinerant newspaperman to St. Louis, New York, and Philadelphia; in 1854 he visited Washington, D.C., and returned briefly to St. Louis; in 1857 he moved to Cincinnati, and later that year, after he had signed on as an apprentice pilot with Horace Bixby, Sam began to learn the River. It was alongside Bixby that he memorized the body of water that would flow beneath the majority of his most famous works. He stored up the memories that became “Old Times on the Mississippi,” got his pilot’s license in 1859, briefly attained the stature he coveted, and stayed on the River until the Civil War, when Admiral Farragut closed the waterway in 1861. The only member of the family with enough funds to pay for Orion’s trip to the Territory of Nevada, Sam managed to help his brother collect his reward for supporting Lincoln in the presidential election of 1860: an appointment as the Secretary to the Territorial Governor. As secretary to the Secretary, Sam accompanied his brother on the twenty-one-day Overland Stage trip, tried his hand briefly at silver mining, and, after a year of fruitless prospecting for instant wealth, joined the staff of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in August 1862.

Out West, just as back in Hannibal and the other towns along the Mississippi, Sam failed to realize his dream of instant wealth and success: he mined, but never struck it rich; he speculated in feet of silver-mine stock, but saw his paper profits disappear. It was a trend of speculation and loss that would follow him throughout his life. At last he began writing journalistic humor to keep from starving. His chores varied from routine reporting to creating wild hoaxes. He turned out columns for the Enterprise (first using the pseudonym “Mark Twain” in February 1863) until he moved to San Francisco in 1864. There, for three years, he earned a living that contrasted dramatically with his dreams of wealth—writing for the San Francisco Call, the Golden Era, the Alta California, and the Sacramento Union. In 1867 under contract to the Alta California, he boarded the steamship Quaker City to report his assault on Europe and the Holy Land. He departed as a well-known West Coast reporter but, because his letters to the Alta were reprinted in other newspapers throughout the country, he landed in New York in mid-November as a national celebrity. In the last month of 1867, he signed a contract to “refine” his letters for publication. The Innocents Abroad (1869), a patchwork scissors-and-paste job that vaulted him to national prominence, was the result. It was the first book that Mark Twain wrote; the author of columns and pages and volumes of newspaper humor for eighteen years confronted, for the first time, the artistic dilemmas of composing full-length books.

But the trip on the Quaker City had an even more impressive aftermath. Charles Langdon, the son of a prominent, liberal, wealthy Elmira, New York, coal magnate, had become a member of Mark Twain’s lunatic fringe on board the Quaker City. In December 1867 Clemens met Charlie’s sister, Olivia, and, after a two-year courtship, Clemens married Olivia on February 2, 1870. If there was anything approaching whirlwind proportions in the event, it was the total change in Mark Twain’s life and career. For almost two decades, he was an itinerant newspaper-man; for just as long, he earned his living on an almost hourly basis, and his success depended on topical, ephemeral, and regional literature. But after his marriage he had—for the first time in almost twenty years—a permanent mailing address; he made the commitment to book, rather than newspaper, publication; he traded his freedom for a family, a job, and a father-in-law who saddled him with a home, a mortgage, and a loan to assume part-ownership in the Buffalo, New York, Express, for which he had previously written articles. The Sam Clemens who had made his way without boss or business hours deflected his career more significantly in the early 1870s than at any other time in his life.

The remarkable success of The Innocents Abroad convinced Twain that he could make a living by the more respectable profession of book author. He cut his journalistic ties with the Express , moved his wife and infant son, Langdon, to Hartford, Connecticut, and worked on the manuscript that was to become his reminiscence of his Western years, Roughing It.

In the genteel Hartford literary community of Nook Farm, with Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Dudley Warner as neighbors, the Clemens family spent almost two decades. There, and on summer trips to Elmira, New York, and frequent visits to Europe, Mark Twain turned out the literature that was to make him a folk hero in his own right and the author of some of America’s most familiar books. After Roughing It, he and his neighbor Warner collaborated on the political satire The Gilded Age (1873).