The Gilded Age - Mark Twain [230]
4 Her private figure of speech for Brother—or Son-in-law.
5 The $7,000 left by Mr. Noble with his state legislature was placed in safe keeping to await the claim of the legitimate owner. Senator Dilworthy made one little effort through his protégé the embryo banker to recover it, but there being no notes of hand or other memoranda to support the claim, it failed. The moral of which is, that when one loans money to start a bank with, one ought to take the party’s written acknowledgment of the fact.
6 The translations of the chapter-head mottoes were prepared in 1899 by J. Hammond Trumbull, eminent historian and Hartford neighbor of Samuel Clemens and Charles Dudley Warner, for the first authorized uniform edition of Mark Twain’s writings. Trumbull originally supplied Clemens and Warner with the mottoes for the first edition of The Gilded Age in 1873. The source for the translations printed here is the 1915 text of The Gilded Age published by Grosset & Dunlap. Editors of the Modern Library Classics series have corrected some of the original page references and chapter numbers in the translations to match those of the current volume.
MARK TWAIN
Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. His family moved to the Mississippi River port town of Hannibal four years later. His father—who failed as a storekeeper, worked as a clerk, and was finally appointed justice of the peace—died when Sam was eleven. Soon afterward the boy began working as an apprentice printer, and by age sixteen he was occasionally writing newspaper sketches. He left Hannibal at eighteen to work as an itinerant printer in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. From 1857 to 1861 he worked on Mississippi River steamboats, advancing from cub pilot to licensed pilot.
When the Civil War interrupted river traffic, Sam headed west with his brother Orion, who had been appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory. Settling at first in Carson City, he left his brother’s employ and tried his luck at prospecting at various mining sites. He was unsuccessful at mining, but his humorous contributions to various regional periodicals attracted notice, and in September 1862 he accepted an offer of employment on the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, soon to be one of the West’s outstanding newspapers. There he came under the influence of Sagebrush School writers, especially Joseph T. Goodman and Dan De Quille, and his writing career began.
At first he adopted the pen name of Josh, but in January 1863 he changed it to Mark Twain, originally a river term indicating safe water. He left Virginia City in May 1864 for San Francisco, from where he continued to send columns to the Enterprise, but he also wrote for several local newspapers, including the San Francisco Call, the Alta California, and the Sacramento Union. The Union sent him on a five-month trip to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) in 1866, from which he wrote articles that were soon adapted for a lecture tour that began on his return, and later for chapters of Roughing It. The Alta California paid for his passage in 1867 on an organized tour of Europe and the Near East. His growing fame as a humorous writer and lecturer was enhanced by The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867).
After his marriage to Olivia Louis (Livy) Langdon in 1870, Twain settled first in Buffalo, New York, and then for two decades in Hartford, Connecticut. His newspaper sketches from his European trip were expanded into The Innocents Abroad (1869), and his Western and Sandwich Island adventures were transformed into Roughing It (1872), both financial successes. The Gilded Age, written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, followed in 1873. Twain subsequently mined his