Legacy Matters

Mark Twain's obsession with death

David Kipen explores  Mark Twain's lifelong preoccupation with death in Twain's most chilling time was a fall in San Francisco

A cheerful approach it isn't, but a careful scrutiny of Twain's life and career discloses a man fascinated with suicide, murder, funerals, wakes, corpses, damnation and reincarnation to a degree well beyond mere morbidity. Rumors of Mark Twain's obsession with death cannot possibly be exaggerated.

Ultimately, of course, death is one of the few things we all have in common. However, Twain survived a youth more shadowed by mortality than many, and they were deaths of a particularly immediate and grisly kind.

Not only did his forbidding father, Judge Clemens, die of pneumonia when Twain was 11, but Twain is said to have witnessed the autopsy through a keyhole. Not only was he at his "sinless" brother Henry's bedside as he lay dying after a steamboat explosion, but Twain would forever blame himself for getting Henry his fateful job on board.
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But the uncanniest evidence for Twain's fixation on mortal matters is simply this: that in his two most enduring books, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and its habitually underrated junior partner, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," both title characters essentially attend their own funerals

Twain came very close to suicide in San Francisco in 1866. 
When Twain put the pistol to his head that day in San Francisco, he couldn't know that he was holding the future of American literature at gunpoint. No man in that position ever knows just how much one bullet can wing. As always, best not to chance it.