John Marshall Clemens: Mark Twain's Life

In 1830 John Marshall Clemens bought 75,000 acres of farmland and wooded acres in Tennessee. In his eyes he had established wealth and well-being for his family forever. This however was not the case, see in order to become wealthy off his land he would of need to have done something with it, instead of just keeping ownership of it. Owing it will not make you rich, but just give you the appearance of being rich. Five years after his purchase of the land on November 30th, his son was born. He named his son Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Samuel Clemens understood that he wasn't going to get rich off his father's land and decided on becoming a writer.
In fact, at his birth the heavens bespoke of something "unusual" about to happen, because on the night of November 30, 1835, the sky was full of Halley's Comet; and in London at that moment a proud cosmologist named Edmund Halley was predicting a return in about 75 years. Sure enough, when Sam Clemens died on April 21, 1910, Halley's Comet was in the sky the second time. But by then the world had come to know Samuel Clemens as Mark Twain, and he was famous. (Winship, R. (2012) para. 3) We in this folklore have an impulse to precursor and envision things by bizarre lights in the sky. Ernest Hemingway said this about Twain: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark
Twain called Huckleberry Finn." (Winship, R. (2012) para. 5) This document however fails to mention the rest of Ernest Hemingway's quote which was: “American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” I would have to agree with him on that, there hasn't been anything as good since Huckleberry Finn. However, Robert Winship believes he was wrong. He believed James Fenimore Cooper and Herman Melville to be good as well. He isn't wrong they were both very popular writers, but still not as popular as Mark Twain, at least not in my eyes. It goes on to talk about Twain's first book The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and other Sketches and how and why he came to writing this story.
These were troubled Civil War times: people needed a respite—and readers reacted to the tale of a competitor loading his enemy's frog with buckshot in its gullet so his own frog would win a jumping contest. That's about as direct a plot as you can get. Or, as any humorist could get; because that was mark Twain's genius: he was funny (Winship, R. (2012) para.8) Clemens did not want to write an autobiography or at least he didn't want it to be published yet.
He contracted with Harper and Brothers , that his autobiography not be published until 100 years after his death. He didn't want people to know the bad things and he wanted to maintain his integrity. I can't say I blame him with the life he lived. The actual Autobiography of Mark Twain runs to 700 pages long. That is a lot of pages for an autobiography. Just shows how much this man had been through in his lifetime. Then it goes on to talk about pretty much everything Mark Twain ever wrote about in chronological order, just like his
autobiography. It shows everything he published:
A Brief chronology of Twain's publications is as follows:
Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867)
The Innocents Abroad (1869) Roughing It (1872)
The Gilded Age (1873)
Mark Twain's Sketches, New and Old (1875)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
A Tramp Abroad (1880) The Adventures o/Huckleberry Finn (1884-1885)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) The Traged:y of Puddinhead Wilson (1894)
Following the Equator (1897)
(Winship, R. (2012) pg. 112 para.1)