[1] While from time to time attending church and occasionally making references to God, Twain at one point was unambiguous regarding his atheism: "There is nothing. There is no God and no universe, there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought. And I am that thought. And God, and the Universe, and Time, and Life, and Death, and Joy and Sorrow and Pain only a grotesque and brutal dream, evolved from the frantic imagination of that same Thought." Letter to Joseph Twichell, reprinted in Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (1969), edited by William Gibson.
Father: John Clemens (storekeeper)
Mother: Jane Lampton
Wife: Olivia Langdon (m. 2-Feb-1870, d. 5-Jun-1904, four children)
Son: Langdon (b. 1870, d. 1872)
Daughter: Jean (b. 1880, d. 1909)
Daughter: Susy (b. 1872, d. 1896)
Daughter: Clara Clemens (b. 8-Jun-1874, d. 19-Nov-1962)
E Clampus Vitus
Phi Beta Kappa Society
Bankruptcy 1894
Coma 21-Apr-1910
Risk Factors: Depression
Rotten Library Page:
Mark Twain
Author of books:
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867, short stories)
The Innocents Abroad (1869, novel)
Mark Twain's (Burlesque) Autobiography (1871, memoir)
Roughing It (1872, novel)
The Gilded Age (1873, novel, with Charles Dudley Warner)
Mark Twain's Sketches: New and Old (1875, short stories)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876, novel)
A True Story (1877, novel)
Punch, Brothers, Punch! (1880, novel)
The Prince and the Pauper (1882, novel)
The Stolen White Elephant (1882, novel)
Life on the Mississippi (1883, novel)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885, novel)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889, novel)
The American Claimant (1892, novel)
Merry Tales (1892, short stories)
The One-Million Pound Bank-Note (1893, novel)
Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894, novella)
The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894, novel)
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896, novel)
Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom Sawyer, Detective, and Other Stories (1896, short stories)
Following the Equator (1897)
How to Tell a Story and Other Essays (1897, essays)
The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays (1900, anthology)
A Double-Barrelled Detective Story (1902, novella)
My Debut as a Literary Person (1903)
A Dog's Tale (1904, short story)
Extracts from Adam's Diary (1904, short story)
King Leopold's Soliloquy (1905)
What Is Man? (1906, essay, anonymous)
The $30,000 Bequest (1906, novel)
Eve's Diary (1906, short story)
Christian Science (1907, nonfiction)
A Horse's Tale (1907)
Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909)
Extract From Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (1909)
Mark Twain's Speeches (1910, essays)
The Mysterious Stranger (1916)
What is Man? And Other Essays (1917, essays)
Mark Twain's Letters (1917, letters)
The Curious Republic of Gondour (1919)
THe Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories (1922, short stories)
Europe and Elsewhere (1923)
Mark Twain's Autobiography (1924, memoir, 2 vols.)
Mark Twain's Notebook (1935, essays)
The Washoe Giant in San Francisco (1938)
Mark Twain's Travels with Mr. Brown (1940)
Mark Twain in Eruption (1940)
AKA Samuel Langhorne Clemens
