Word: twains
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When the Civil War broke out, Twain may have briefly entertained pro-Union sentiments but at length decided to serve with a ragtag bunch of Confederate irregulars. After a couple of weeks, "hunted like a rat the whole time," he thought better of that commitment and, as Huck Finn did, lit out for the territory. This territory was Nevada and California, where he prospected for silver without luck and practiced scurrilous journalism and general drunkardry with zest...
...Twain first came to national attention in 1865, when he published a comical short story in dialect, which was eventually titled The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. ("You never see a frog so modest and straightfor'ard as he was, for all he was so gifted.") It appeared in newspapers all across the country, was received as a whole new kind of hilariousness and made him famous. "At the close of the Civil War, Americans were ready for a good cleansing laugh, untethered to bitter political argument," writes Twain's recent, so far definitive biographer, Ron Powers...
...career as an audience-convulsing lecturer that grew out of that first small triumph, Twain would become, as Powers puts it, "the nation's first rock star." We know his voice only from written descriptions of it. It was resonant enough to hold a large lecture-hall audience rapt. He spoke in a slow backwoods drawl, with many strategic pauses. In 1891 he experimented with an Edison dictating machine but concluded that "you can't write literature with it." (He liked to have a human secretary taking notes and laughing in the right places.) But he wasn't the sort...
...first flush of success, Twain began work on a travel book, The Innocents Abroad, that would bring him sizable amounts of money. In that book he simultaneously took on the pretensions of Europe and the spectacle of a bunch of comical American tourists, including himself, making a sustained encounter with an Old World that was never quite as impressive as it was supposed...
Travel writing was lucrative, but novels were what serious literary men were expected to produce, and from the start Twain longed to be taken seriously, to be regarded as more than "merely" a humorist. So by 1873 he had rolled out his first novel, The Gilded Age, which he co-wrote with a Connecticut journalist, Charles Dudley Warner. With that book's title, Twain gave the post--Civil War era, a time of boundless greed and opportunism, the name it still has and that it shares, in some quarters, with the era we seem to be willy-nilly emerging from...