The Modern Mr. Twain

Printing, polemic, and self-invention

Mainstream media, Andrej Mir argues, have become megaphones for the hard left. The digital audience was initially white, educated, and progressive. Chasing those dollars, media chose to accommodate those views: comfortably anti-Semitic, misandrist, and contemptuous of traditional family life. Pointing to this conformity, Dominick Green has recently called for a breakup of “hostile and monolithic agglomerations in the information sector.”

Both Mir and Green believe that social media can take on the progressive chorus. This is possible because, with Trump, social media became a channel for conservatives. Mir also believes that commercial pressure might prompt the media and corporations to act out of self-interest and tone down their partisanship.

Mir argues that, for first part of the twentieth century, the polemical tone of print journalism was lowered so that newspapers could increase their circulation. I thought about the arguments of Mir and Green while I was reading Ron Chernow’s hefty new biography of Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens, 1835-1910). Chernow observes that papers “were then expected to be highly partisan and opinionated” and adds that this was “a hyperbolic style that would play to the strength of young Sam Clemens” (Chernow, p. 37).

After Twain’s time, capitalism triumphed over partisanship, and what Mir calls “bothsidesism” appeared. It was a kind of compromise that lasted until two or three decades ago.

In 2015, more than a century after his death, the first volume of Twain’s auto-biography appeared. A flood of writing followed (even though parts of the text had been published earlier). In a comment on “the Mark Twain industry,” The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik wrote that the “moral intelligence” of Huck Finn “can hardly be overpraised.” Huck refused to restore his Black friend Jim to slavery, and that moment, Gopnik declares, is “the moral hinge of American literature” (p. 82). That sounds like overpraise to me.

Twain’s journalism followed the polemical mode of newspapers of his time, but his views stood apart. He advocated ending slavery and improving the status of women. Twain denounced the evils of American imperialism, which fits perfectly with progressive hostility to America exceptionalism. Nobody could denounce imperialism in 2010, Gopnik says, and remain “a beloved national figure” (p. 83). But times change. Today denouncing American imperialism is necessary. Look at the Obamas and others who secured their political future by running against America.

Unlike these self-admiring pragmatists, Twain ran with America. He had a broad vision of what made the country what it was. He became a beloved author because he captured the distinctiveness of ordinary speech; he favored outsiders and have-nots. His disregard for social boundaries and his defiance of convention are celebrated. His boyhood willfulness and perversity never left him (Chernow, pp. 21, 29). He was bold and unpredictable. For example, he married into a very rich and traditional New England family, the opposite extreme of his impoverished background. But he was true to his roots, and people recognized their views in his irreverent jokes.

An outspoken critic of misguided people, Twain was repeatedly gulled by those offering shady schemes for getting rich (pp. 472, 478). Twain thought of himself as a tycoon. But he had an “investing mania,” Chernow says, and he was no sooner out of one self-made financial crisis than he rushed headlong into another, as we see below (p. 633).

Twain saw greed as an enemy of happiness but was captive to it (p. 484). In 1895, when he went bankrupt, newspapers commented on the irony. “Having lectured readers on the perils of greed,” Chernow writes, Twain “had now succumbed himself.” He could not overcome “the magnitude of his unconquerable delusion” that tremendous success was always within reach (pp. 498-501, 506). This weakness had far-reaching consequences for him and his family, but it fed a side of him that, Chernow suggests, made Twain the first American celebrity. For, as he shook off his losses and defeats, Twain demonstrated a talent for self-invention.

Twain’s worst investments were those he made in new printing machinery. He had ink in his blood, we might say, one of many writers interested in the means of reproducing words mechanically. Benjamin Franklin and Walt Whitman were skilled typesetters and bookmakers. Virginia and Leonard Woolf founded and operated the famed Hogarth Press. Printing helped Twain find an identity.

Between the ages of 11 and 16, Twain worked in a print shop, most of the time as a typesetter. Assistants like Twain were called “printer’s devils” because their hands were stained with black ink. He was described by another typesetter as “a little sandy-haired boy,” smoking a cigar or pipe, “mounted on a little box” (p. 35; he was smoking by the age of eight, p. 22). He seems to have been happy with his work, even though he was just one step above an indentured servant.

The printer’s devil mixed ink and kept track of type. He knew the drudgery of picking type one letter at a time. He chose “sorts,” which were blocks with typographical characters on them, and placed them in a form called a composing stick. The letterforms were reversed and upside down, and reading, and composing letters that were reversed and upside down took experience and skill.

Above: all sorts of “sorts”

Sorts were picked from cases, with capital letters in the upper case (used less often) and small letters closer at hand in the lower case. It is not surprising that Twain would later champion a means of mechanizing that process.

To be “out of sorts” meant to be out of, say, the letter b or s. “Watch your p’s and q’s” was advice to printers who had to read letters backwards and upside down—b and d were as tricky. Once the type had been selected and arranged and the text printed, each sort returned to its proper place. Johannes Gutenberg invented moveable type in 1450. The method dominated printing until Twain’s time, about 1890. Those printing skills are lovingly preserved to this day.

No doubt the boy setting type absorbed a great deal about letters, words, and printing, as did low-level workers in other fields. Michelangelo worked as a stonecutter as a boy and became one of the Western world’s greatest sculptors and painters. Likewise, typesetting would make the typesetter keenly aware of many aspects of writing and editing. Chernow points out that there was “no clear line” to separate “the printing and editorial sides of a newspaper.” He describes Twain’s typesetting as a step, “willy-nilly, into the writing world” (p. 35).

It is possible that Twain sometimes typeset and edited his own work. “Twain, once he’d mastered printing skills, could set type so quickly that he could compose his own copy while standing before a type case, setting his thoughts directly into type,” Brad Bradford claims. Twain’s first published essays appeared in the Hannibal Journal, edited by his brother Orion. Twain briefly had his own column in the Journal. He might have typeset these pieces himself, but we don’t know if he wrote the text in the process or if he set an already-written text in type.

Twain did not continue with printing after he had completed his printing apprenticeships. His heart was elsewhere. “When I was a boy,” he wrote, “there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboat man.” He grew up watching steamboats, so this ambition makes sense.

But it was by chance that he trained to become a steamboat pilot (1859-61), a skill at which he proved unusually adept, even as a beginner. He had heard about a silver mine in Brazil that would make him rich. He rushed to New Orleans, only to find that nobody was sailing to Brazil from there and that no one had plans to do so (Chernow, p. 48). He developed a relationship with Horace Bixby, the pilot of the ship he took to New Orleans. For a fee, Bixby taught Twain the business. The experience, Chernow believes, turned the boy into a man (p. 50).

When the Civil War began, commercial traffic on the Mississippi River stopped, ending Twain's career as a riverboat pilot. Journalism was next. He went to Nevada and California and wrote for newspapers in both places. That’s when he took the river into himself and became “Mark Twain.” The words mean “two fathoms,” a safe depth for Mississippi riverboats.

In 1865 he made a breakthrough with a short story that became known as "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." After a visit to Hawaii (then the Sandwich Islands) he began lecturing. He went to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 and out of that experience wrote The Innocents Abroad (1869), his first book. It was a hit, and Twain was on his way (Chernow, p. 135).

He married in 1870 and in 1871 moved his family to Hartford, Connecticut. He lived next door to Charles Dudley Warner, with whom he wrote a satirical novel called The Gilded Age (1875). In that same year, Twain used his experience as a pilot as the basis for a series of articles that appeared in Atlantic. This material was later revised in Life on the Mississippi (Chernow, p. 303). The book mixes the experiences of a riverboat pilot with descriptions of the river. It also points to the end of the riverboat as a career option; trains were introduced and offered easier shipping and travel.

As a pilot, Twain’s job was to read the river, Chernow says, and to memorize its ins and outs and numerous peculiarities, which varied from mile to mile and which were especially dangerous at night (pp. 49-50). The captain gave the orders, but the pilot called the shots. “A pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth,” Twain wrote in the book. “By long habit, pilots came to put all their wishes in the form of commands.”

The pilot had to see beneath the surface and could do so. The heart of Twain’s humor is his power to verbalize what is beneath the surface. Later, as a writer, he had recalled the freedom and the power he enjoyed as a pilot in Life on the Mississippi (1883). He disliked having “to put my will in the weak shape of a request, instead of launching it in the crisp language of an order.” He believed that “a pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.”

Kings are but the hampered servants of parliament and people; parliaments sit in chains forged by their constituency; the editor of a newspaper cannot be independent, but must work with one hand tied behind him by party and patrons, and be content to utter only half or two-thirds of his mind; no clergyman is a free man and may speak the whole truth, regardless of his parish's opinions; writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none. (Life, ch. 14)

The writer was not free to publish his impressions without modifying them, without taking into consideration the views of an editor. The editor, in his turn, had to modify to accommodate the wishes of others. As Twain saw things, only the pilot was free. Everybody else answered to somebody.

Twain’s desire for unimpeded freedom caused him to test the line between fact and fiction. The following excerpt was written 21 years after Twain had worked on the river. He had a chance to relive his Mississippi journeys. But now he was famous. He knew he would write about this journey, and while making the journey he did not want to be hampered by his reputation—that is, to have to answer to others.

As I proposed to make notes, with a view to printing, I took some thought as to methods of procedure. I reflected that if I were recognized, on the river, I should not be as free to go and come, talk, inquire, and spy around, as I should be if unknown; I remembered that it was the custom of steamboatmen in the old times to load up the confiding stranger with the most picturesque and admirable lies, and put the sophisticated friend off with dull and ineffectual facts: so I concluded, that, from a business point of view, it would be an advantage to disguise our party with fictitious names. The idea was certainly good, but it bred infinite bother; for although Smith, Jones, and Johnson are easy names to remember when there is no occasion to remember them, it is next to impossible to recollect them when they are wanted. (ch. 22, p. 186)

Twain thought about imitating steamboat workers who told admirable lies to strangers but who bored “sophisticated” listeners with facts. He was, indirectly, suggesting that those men were authors like himself. The passage seems to be about the boatmen’s freedom to choose between fact and fancy. For the “confiding stranger,” the boatmen conjured up picturesque lies—stories with something beneath the surface. But the “sophisticated friend” did not need to be entertained with fiction, and for such people “dull and ineffectual facts” were enough.

Twain decided that fiction was better than fact. The contrast between the sophisticated friend who scorns fiction and the happily-entertained but simpler person tells us something about Twain’s views of his audiences. He preferred a humble audience to an educated one because simpler people were more willing to be entertained. He entertained himself by making up things to say to them, with folksy wisdom hidden beneath a comical surface.

Twain was untiringly facetious. “Sufficient unto the day is one baby. As long as you are in your right mind don't you ever pray for twins. Twins amount to a permanent riot; and there ain't any real difference between triplets and a insurrection” (“The Babies Speech,” 1879; see Schmidt). I doubt that his listeners, laughing at this quip, disagreed with the common sense hidden behind it. As is often the case with his witty remarks, we get the joke first and the point later. Twain understood that one’s children cramped one’s happiness and one’s freedom. This would be tragically true in his case. And infant son and two of his three daughters died before he did.

Twain constantly pushed against the limits of fact and sought to make fantasy real. He pursued printing processes not because he loved to make books but because he wanted to be rich, which, to him, was to be free. That was his chief desire, and it clouded his judgment.

The first schemes that attracted him involved typesetting and printing. He became interested in a process for molding brass forms that could be used in stamping book covers, called the “Kaolatype process.” Twain invested some $20,000 in the process before it had so much as been invented. When he asked the inventors to show him how the process worked, but their workshop burned to the ground the night before his visit. Their second workshop also went up in flames before Twain could see it (p. 277). It was all a swindle. Expensive though it was, Twain learned nothing from the experience.

Later, he was prepared to invest heavily in a new process for printing (the operative word) patterns on carpets and other textiles, an industry he knew nothing about. Nonetheless he prepared an elaborate but, as Chernow says, “cockeyed business scheme” for textile production that, he was sure, would make him rich (pp. 634-35). He filled dozens of pages with figures showing how profitable an investment in such a machine might be.

Twain was even more susceptible to claims made about a typesetting machine invented by James W. Paige. Twain plowed $50,000 into the device (some say more) before finally admitting that it was a failure (below; Chernow, p. 381).

It was an ingenious machine, everybody admitted, but it had not been put to hard use and, when tested, was found to lack what Chernow calls “business reliability” (p. 282). The machine remained unused for years, but Twain continued to fund it.

Meanwhile, the Linotype machine was invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler. The Linotype was simpler and sturdier than Paige’s device and, although slower, proved highly successful. This is not to say that the Linotype was, in any sense simple, as we see below. At one time, a large New York newspaper used 42 of them. Put into service in 1886, the Linotype proved so dependable that it was still being used in the 1980s.

When it came to printing, Chernow writes, “Twain never understood the trade-off between technical perfection and business reliability.” Nor did he understand “that, in the end, dependability trumped mechanical sophistication” (p. 507). Blinkered in this way, but supplied with his own, or his wife’s, or a creditor’s money, Twain thought that pursuit of his dreams would, in the end, free him from the financial constraints that he ran up against constantly.

He had some reason for his self-confidence. He was an early adapter, one of the first writers to type write. He used a typewriter to complete the manuscript of Tom Sawyer (Chernow, pp. 231, 234). Twain boasted that he was an early user of the recently invented telephone.

Twain was always on the lookout for the next big thing, even in his own writing. He made “grandiose claims for his stream-of-consciousness method, alleging its originality would rank with ‘the steam engine, the printing press and the electric telegraph’” (Chernow, p. 850). Twain reached the edge of modernism. He attempted to write an autobiography using “the principle of free association,” and in this he was ahead of James Joyce, Chernow believes. His method was to dictate, sometimes to a machine. This was a good way to assemble notes and fragments, but, unlike Joyce, Twain never pulled the pieces together.

Twain changed as he grew older. He lost his conviviality and became morose, taciturn, and bitter. Two of his daughters died and the third had to give up plans for a career in singing. Even so, his last years were not all darkness. In 1907, Oxford University awarded him an honorary doctorate. He had had, at best, a minimal education. Yet he became, his own words, a man who was “as widely celebrated a literary person as America has ever produced,” an estimate nobody then or now could dispute. No American university had recognized him, so the honorary degree from Oxford was especially welcome (Chernow, p. 883).

Twain found his time in England packed with celebrity events. He had dinner with George Bernard Shaw, who recalled reading Twain’s early books when he was twelve (p. 890). En route to a garden party hosted at Windsor Castle by King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, Twain was greeted by large crowds, as if he were royalty himself (p. 886).

The greeting that meant the most to him, I wager, took place when his ship arrived in England. “He was cheered by stevedores as he strolled down the gangplank and lifted his hat in salute” (Chernow, p. 884). Shipyard workers and royalty alike recognized and revered him. Twain was probably the most famous man in the world.

He remains difficult to track. Twain wanted to improve every story (p. 826). He spoke to Albert Bigelow Paine, to whom he had given permission to write his biography. Paine found Twain’s memories to be “anecdotes encrusted with invented details,” as Chernow describes them (p. 827). As he often did, Twain enlarged facts with fiction. Twain re-invented himself so often that it is impossible to form a single impression of him.

“There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desireable,” he wrote (c. 1895-96; qtd. Chernow, p. 22). You can’t read many of Twain’s aphorisms without thinking of the greatest aphorist in the English language, Oscar Wilde. Few details survive from their meeting in Ban Nauheim, Germany, in 1892, but Twain and Wilde did speak. George Bernard Shaw said that Wilde “got much of his humour, especially his fondness for exaggeration, from Mark Twain” (pp. 457-58; Wilde lived 1854-1900).

The jumble of Twain’s views and activities, all represented in his published work, is less apparent to us than it should be because, like so many great writers, he is remembered for a small part of what he did. Say “Twain,” and people think of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

In Twain’s case, however, some posthumous balance has been achieved, thanks to the actor Hal Holbrook (1925-2021; above). In the 1960s, Holbrook created “Mark Twain Tonight!” This is a 90-minute monologue that Holbrook developed from Twain’s materials between 1954 and 2014. Holbrook was nominated for an Oscar and won a Tony and several Emmy awards for his work with Twain.

Holbrook recreated the elder Twain, bitter, sarcastic, and ironic, and offered a mere glimpse of the figure Twain’s audiences adored: a sly and witty sage, folksy, poorly dressed, loved by millions. Readers today wonder which self was the surface and which was the one that hummed beneath it.

July 2025

Sources

Bradford, Brad. “True to Type.” Letter to the editor of The New Yorker, Dec. 13, 2010, p. 10.

Chernow, Ron. Mark Twain. New York: Penguin, 2025.

Gopnik, Adam. ““A Critic at Large: The Man in the White Suit. Why the Mark Twain industry keeps growing.” The New Yorker. Nov. 29, 2010, pp. 78-83.

Green, Dominick. “An Industrial Policy for the Nonprofit Sector.” The Wall Street Journal. June 9, 2025. A17.

Holbrook, Hall. Mark Twain Tonight! Videodisc. West Long Branch, NJ : Kultur [1999?], ©1967. 90 minutes.

Mir, Andrey. “An Obit for Journalism.” City Journal. Winter 2025. 99-105.

Schmidt, Barbara, ed. “Babies.” In Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections, &
Related Resources. http://www.twainquotes.com/index.html. Seen June 19, 2025.

Twain, Mark (S. L. Clemens). Autobiography. Anon. Review. The Week. Jan. 8, 2015. https://theweek.com/articles/489022/autobiography-mark-twain-volume-1-edited-by-harriet-elinor-smith-et-al

——-. Life on the Mississippi. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1874, 1875.