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[1] === “Mark Twain’s Boyhood: An Interview with Mrs. Jane Clemens” (1885) Anonymous Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, was born in a cabin near Florida , Missouri, on 30 November 1835 and at the age of four moved with his slaveholding family thirty miles northeast to the port village of Hannibal on the Mississippi River. There his father, John Marshall Clemens, kept a store and served as a justice of the peace before dying of pneumonia in 1847 at the age of forty-eight. His widow, Jane Lampton Clemens (1803–90), lived in her later years with her oldest son, Orion (1825–97), and his wife, Mollie (1834–1904), in Keokuk, Iowa. “She was of a sunshine disposition,” her son Sam remembered, “and her long life was mainly a holiday for her. She always had the heart of a young girl. Through all of the family troubles she maintained a kind of perky stoicism which was lighted considerably by her love of gossip, gaudy spectacles like parades and funerals, bright colors, and animals” (Skandera Trombley, Company of Women, 14). In 1885 she granted what is her only known interview on the subject of her famous son’s hardscrabble boyhood. in an unpretentious two-story brick dwelling, at the intersection of High and Seventh streets, Keokuk, Iowa, lives Orion Clemens and his wife. . . . With them resides Mr. Clemens’s mother, who will be 82 years of age next June. The writer, being stranded in Keokuk for a few hours, improved the opportunity to make a call upon the venerable lady, and in the course of an hour’s pleasant conversation, which followed, received from her lips many anecdotes concerning her most noted son, which will be new to the generality of readers. “Sam was always a good-hearted boy,” said Mrs. Clemens, “but he was a very wild and mischievous one, and do what we would we could never make him go to school. This used to trouble his father and me dreadfully, and we were convinced that he would never amount to as much in the [2] world as his brothers, because he was not near so steady and sober-minded as they were.” “I suppose, Mrs. Clemens, that your son in his boyhood days somewhat resembled his own Tom Sawyer, and that a fellow feeling is what made him so kind to the many hair-breadth escapades of that celebrated youth?” “Ah, no,” replied the old lady with a merry twinkle in her eye. “He was more like Huckleberry Finn than Tom Sawyer. Often his father would start him off to school and in a little while would follow him to ascertain his whereabouts. There was a large stump on the way to the schoolhouse, and Sam would take his position behind that and as his father went past would gradually circle around it in such a way as to keep out of sight. Finally his father and the teacher both said it was of no use to try to teach Sam anything , because he was determined not to learn. But I never gave up. He was always a great boy for history and could never get tired of that kind of reading , but he hadn’t any use for schoolhouses and textbooks.” “It must have been a great trial to you.” “Indeed it was,” rejoined the mother, “and when Sam’s father died, which occurred when Sam was 11 years of age, I thought then, if ever, was the proper time to make a lasting impression on the boy and work a change in him, so I took him by the hand and went with him into the room where the coffin was and in which the father lay, and with it between Sam and me I said to him that here in this presence I had some serious requests to make of him, and that I knew his word once given was never broken. For Sam never told a falsehood. He turned his streaming eyes upon me and cried out, ‘Oh, mother, I will do anything, anything you ask of me except to go to school; I can’t do that!’ That was the very request I was going to make. Well, we afterward had a sober talk, and I concluded to let him go into a printing office to learn the trade, as I couldn’t have him running wild. He did so, and has gradually picked up enough education to enable him to do about...

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