"I will promise anything," Twain would remember saying, "if
you don't make me go to school! Anything!"
"No Sammy; you need not go to school anymore. Only promise
to be a better boy," his mother said. "Promise not to break my
heart."
You will hear echoes of Jane Clemens in Tom Sawyer. Twain
modeled Tom's Aunt Polly after his mother, whom he called his
"first and closest friend." Aunt Polly is not Jane Clemens with
a different name and a frontier dialect, however. Jane Clemens
was stronger and quicker than Polly. When defending the
oppressed, Twain would remember, she was "the most eloquent
person I have heard speak."
For two years after his father's death, Samuel worked as an
apprentice to a Hannibal printer. In 1850 his older brother,
Orion, bought a local newspaper. Samuel went to work for him,
but Orion ran such an unprofitable operation that Samuel often
went without pay.
In 1853, at age seventeen, Samuel set off on his own. For
two years he worked as a typesetter in St. Louis, New York, and
Philadelphia before returning to the Mississippi Valley and
working once more for Orion, who was now a printer in Keokuk,
Iowa.
At this point, Samuel had published several short pieces in
Orion's newspaper and a humorous sketch in a Boston magazine.
Yet he had no desire to make writing his life's work. He left
Keokuk in November 1856, and in the spring he persuaded a
steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River to teach him his trade.
He spent the next few years steering steamboats up and down the
Mississippi. In April 1861, the Civil War halted river traffic
between the North and South and put Clemens out of work.
Clemens was unhappy to leave the river. He loved the work
and its high pay. Besides, as he wrote in 1875, "A pilot, in
those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent
human being that lived in the earth...."
In Chapter 6 of Tom Sawyer, Twain speaks of Huck Finn in
similar terms. "Huckleberry came and went, at his own free
will... he did not have to go to school or to church, or call
any being master or obey anybody...."
In Iowa, Samuel's brother Orion had backed Abraham Lincoln's
1860 race for the U.S. presidency. His reward was an
appointment to a high administrative post in the Nevada
Territory. He went with Orion and spent a year unsuccessfully
