Is Mark Twain’s old age best forgotten?

Mark Twain conquered almost every challenge that came his way except old age. Living well into his seventies, he was a printer, an investigative journalist, a riverboat captain, a government functionary, a bestselling novelist, an imperialism-defying political essayist, a successful playwright and a devoted father and husband. He travelled the world giving lectures that made him many fortunes, which he often used to replenish the fortunes he lost from his madder and most poorly managed investment schemes, such as the Paige Compositor, a self-justifying printing press which worked briefly for a few days in 1894 and then, just as mysteriously, stopped.

When Twain’s publishing house subsequently went bankrupt, he refused to go bankrupt with it and, at the age of 60, spent the next several years furiously travelling, earning enough to pay back what he owed. No wonder he invented characters such as Huck Finn and Tom Canty – paupers who became princes and princes who became paupers. Eventually he concluded: ‘There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can afford it and when he can’t.’ Throughout a long and hectic life, he never paused long enough to take his own (very good) advice.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens claimed that he adopted the pseudonym Mark Twain from riverboat parlance; but his western friends claimed it stood for tallying up drinks on a bar bill. (Eventually the name served as sufficient international address for posting fan mail.) Like America, Twain lived a double life, one which extended both east and west of the Mississippi valley where he grew up. Out west, he prospected for gold, drank and partied and transcribed tall tales; then he went east, married Olivia Langdon, and inherited her old money and social prestige. He was one of the few American writers who enjoyed and embraced both coasts of a too-big nation, from New York to San Francisco; and even more unusually, he explored what life was like in other countries, journeying and lecturing widely throughout Australia, Europe and India, and making new friends and admirers at every stop on the way.