(November 30, 1835–April 21, 1910), a river measurement meaning “two fathoms deep,” was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Growing up along the Mississippi River in Hannibal, Missouri, he left school at age 12, when his father died. Becoming a printer’s apprentice, he worked briefly for his brother Orion Clemens, who owned a newspaper. For the next several years, he was a “tramp printer,” working and writing in St. Louis, New York City, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and numerous smaller cities.
In 1857–61, as an apprentice Mississippi river pilot, he acquired his pen name from an old steamboat pilot who had died, named Isaiah Sellers, known for writing articles in a New Orleans newspaper and signing them “Mark Twain.” The onset of the Civil War virtually halted all river traffic, so Twain joined the Confederate Army as a lieutenant. After two weeks’ service, he managed to get himself discharged and headed out to Nevada to work for his brother Orion, who had become the Secretary to the Governor of the Nevada Territory. After a futile attempt at mining, he took a job, in 1862, as a reporter in Virginia City, Nevada, using the name “Mark Twain” for the first time.
After a few years, Mark Twain moved to San Francisco, where he wrote his first popular story entitled, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” He then began voyaging, particularly in the Mediterranean Sea and Palestine, where he wrote The Innocents Abroad. While on this trip, he fell in love with the picture of a companion’s sister, Olivia Langdon of Elmira, New York. Immediately upon his return, he met and married her, and, under her encouragement, his writing style greatly improved.
In 1870, they moved from Buffalo, N.Y., to Hartford, Conn., where his attempt at a publishing and typesetting business failed. He paid off his debts by conducting a lecture tour across America, then moved to Europe. After several years, they returned back to the United States, settling in Redding, Conn. In later years, his increased public success was offset by the tragedy of nearly all his family members dying before him.
The many novels written by Mark Twain include: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876; Life on the Mississippi, 1883; The Prince and the Pauper, 1882; A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court, 1889; Joan of Arc, 1896; and many more. In the midst of cynics who doubted the authenticity of Scripture, Mark Twain remarked:
If the Ten Commandments were not written by Moses, then they were written by another fellow of the same name.2724
In his work Innocents Abroad, 1869, which solidly established his reputation as a writer, Mark Twain wrote:
It is hard to make a choice of the most beautiful passage in a book which is so gemmed with beautiful passages as the Bible. …
Who taught these ancient writers the simplicity of language, their felicity of expression, their pathos, and, above all, their faculty of sinking themselves entirely out of sight of the reader and making the narrative stand out alone and seem to tell itself? Shakespeare is always present when one reads his book; Macaulay is present when we follow the march of his stately sentences; but the Old Testament writers are hidden from view.2725
We dismounted on those shores which the feet of the Saviour had made holy ground. … We left Capernaum behind us. It was only a shapeless ruin. It bore no semblance to a town. But, all desolate and unpeopled as it was, it was illustrious ground. From it sprang that tree of Christianity whose broad arms overshadow so many distant lands today. Christ visited his old home at Nazareth, and saw His brothers Joses, Judas, James, and Simon. …
Who wonders what passed in their minds when they saw this brother (who was only a brother to them, however He might be to others a mysterious stranger; who was a God, and had stood face to face with God above the clouds) doing miracles, with crowds of astonished people for witnesses?2726
One of the most astonishing things that has yet fallen under our observation is the exceedingly small portion of the earth from which sprang the new flourishing plant of Christianity. The longest journey our Saviour ever performed was from here to Jerusalem—about one hundred to one hundred and twenty miles. … Leaving out two or three short journeys, He spent His life, preaching His Gospel, and performing His miracles, within a compass no larger than an ordinary county of the United States. …
In the starlight, Galilee has no boundaries but the broad compass of the heavens, and is a theatre meet for great events; meet for the birth of a religion able to save the world; and meet for the stately figure appointed to stand upon its stage and proclaim high decrees.2727
In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876, chapter 13, Mark Twain wrote:
There was no getting around the stubborn fact that taking sweetmeats was only “hooking,” while taking bacon and hams and such valuables was plain simple stealing—and there was a command against that in the Bible. So they inwardly resolved that so long as they remained in the business, their piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing.2728
In The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894, Mark Twain penned:
Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething.2729
Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it because it was forbidden.2730
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.2731
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.2732
Mark Twain quipped:
The calm confidence of a Christian with four aces.2733
When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.2734
From Albert Bigelow Paine’s Mark Twain, 1912, Mark Twain is quoted as saying:
As out of place as a Presbyterian in Hell.2735
From Bernard De Voto’s Mark Twain in Eruption, 1940, Mark Twain is quoted as saying:
I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed with the monkey.2736
Brooks, Phillips (December 13, 1835–January 23, 1893), was an American writer and speaker. He attended Harvard while James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow taught there. He pastored in Philadelphia before becoming the rector of Trinity Church in Boston, and later the bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Massachusetts. In 1867, he wrote the song, O Little Town of Bethlehem:
O little town of Bethlehem!
How still we see thee lie;
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
The silent stars go by;
Yet in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting Light;
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.2737
In his sermon Going Up to Jerusalem, Phillips Brooks wrote:
Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks.2738
Phillips Brooks reasoned:
I do not know how a man can be an American, even if he is not a Christian, and not catch something with regard to God’s purpose as to this great land.2739