” Unlike most men, Samuel Clemens never did renounce his boyhood; he carried with him into maturity miraculously preserved and vibrant memories of his early and middle adolescence, and it was through these memories that he filtered his adult experience. At the age of fifty-five, he wrote to an unknown correspondent: “And yet I can’t go away from the boyhood period and write novels because capital is not sufficient by itself and I lack the other essential: interest in handling the men and experiences of later times,” (Bellamy, Mark Twain as a Literary Artist, 16). On this circumstance, he founded an enviable fame and fortune and an enduring artistic achievement. (Bellamy, 17) Although the splendid moment of his fame is still prolonged and extends immeasurably far into the future, that fame was only a small part of his power.
There was something about him that moves people who knew nothing of his renown, who did not even know who he was. Samuel Clemens’ personality was of a sort that compelled those about him so strongly that wherever he went, he seemed a being from another planet, a visitant from some remote star.
BiographyBorn in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, “Little Sam” was “a wild-headed, impetuous child of sudden ecstasies,” who was constantly running away in the direction of the river and, as he later wrote, was “drowned nine times in Bear Creek and was suspected of being a cat in disguise”; a vividly imaginative child, who loved the companionship of the good-natured slave and visited the Negro quarters beyond the orchard as a place of ineffable enchantment; a child whose sympathy included all inanimate things; a child who “pitied the dead leaf and the murmuring dried weed of November”(Bellamy, 4-7). In many, if not all, of his novels, short stories, and other works, Samuel Langhorne Clemens’ personal life experiences reflect heavily on his writing plots. Stories such as The Notorious Jumping From of Calaveras County, Roughing It, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, AConnecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finnhave all been closely related to some of the adventurous, dangerous, and childish experiences in Clemens’ own life. As a young man, he developed a troublesome cussedness that distinguished his as a child from his elder and younger brother, Orion and Henry. His mischievousness led to a series of escapades: several times nearly drowning, purposefully contracting measles, smoking, rolling rocks down a hill before church-bound carriages, and running away from home.Clemens and his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a port on the Mississippi River, when Samuel was four years old. There, he received a pubic school education.
