A few weeks ago and for no particular reason, I downloaded onto my Audible app, a copy of Ron Chernow’s biography of Mark Twain. Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), one of America’s greatest writers and humorists. Born in Missouri, he grew up in Hannibal on the Mississippi River, a setting that would define his most famous work, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with Huck Finn generally considered his masterpiece. He left school at 12 after his father died and was largely self-educated. He worked as a printer, then spent years as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, which he later called the happiest period of his life. The pen name “Mark Twain” comes from a riverboatman’s call meaning two fathoms deep or safe water. He found fame as a newspaper humorist and travel writer before becoming a novelist. He was enormously famous in his time, a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic. But his later years were marked by financial ruin from bad investments, and deep personal grief. He outlived his wife and two of his three daughters. His late writing grew increasingly dark and bitter. Twain essentially invented the modern American literary voice. He was colloquial, ironic, democratic, and influenced nearly every major American writer who followed him, most notably Ernest Hemingway, who said all American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn. He died in 1910, the same year Halley’s Comet reappeared, as was predicted, which was meaningful given that he had been born during the Comet’s previous pass in 1835.
I am hardly alone in my admiration for Mark Twain, but I admit that the combination of his being a writer who liberally uses humor in his writing makes him especially impactful to me. Mark Twain stood for several core values and principles. First among them was human dignity and anti-racism. Despite growing up in the slaveholding South, Twain became one of the 19th century’s most forceful critics of racism. Huckleberry Finn, beneath its surface adventure, is a sustained moral argument for recognizing the full humanity of Black Americans, but its racial depictions remain one of the richest debates in American literature. At its moral core, Huckleberry Finn is the story of a white boy raised in a racist society who comes, through personal experience and affection, to see an enslaved man as fully human. Huck has internalized the moral logic of his society, which tells him protecting Jim is a sin. He rejects that logic not through abstract principle but through love. Twain is showing that the institution of slavery deformed the moral reasoning of an entire civilization, and that genuine human connection cuts through it. Jim himself is drawn with dignity, grief, and complexity. But, the last quarter of the book, what is called the “Evasion” sequence at the Phelps farm, has troubled readers since publication. That is when there’s a revelation that Jim had already been freed by his owner’s will, making the entire evasion ordeal (and Huck’s moral stance) pointless. Toni Morrison wrote about the “Africanist presence” in American literature, noting how Black characters often exist to define and enable white characters’ moral journeys. Jim’s humanity is real, but it exists in service of Huck’s development. But Huckleberry Finn is still a profoundly anti-slavery novel in its emotional and satirical heart, written by a man who grew up in a slave state and was genuinely reckoning with that history.
Missouri’s relationship with slavery was long, contested, and central to American history in ways that extended far beyond its borders. Missouri entered American consciousness as a slave territory almost from the start. French and Spanish colonial settlers brought enslaved people to the region before American acquisition, and when the United States absorbed the area through the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, slavery was already embedded in its economy and social structure. Lead mining, hemp cultivation, tobacco farming, and river commerce all relied heavily on enslaved labor. Missouri’s application for statehood ignited a national crisis. Admitting Missouri as a slave state would upset the fragile balance between free and slave states in the Senate. The resulting Missouri Compromise of 1820 admitted Missouri as a slave state while simultaneously admitting Maine as a free state, and drew the famous line at 36°30’ north latitude, above which slavery would be prohibited in the remaining Louisiana Territory. This was the first major legislative attempt to contain slavery’s spread, and its eventual unraveling in the 1850s set the country on a direct path to civil war. Missouri also produced one of the most consequential, and morally catastrophic legal decisions in American history. Dred Scott, an enslaved man held by an army surgeon, had lived for years in the free state of Illinois and the free territory of Wisconsin before being returned to Missouri. He sued for his freedom in St. Louis courts in 1846. The case wound through the legal system for eleven years before Chief Justice Roger Taney’s Supreme Court ruled in 1857 that Scott had no standing to sue, that Black people held no rights a white man was bound to respect, and that Congress had never had the authority to restrict slavery in the territories, thereby rendering the Missouri Compromise itself unconstitutional. The decision inflamed Northern opinion and accelerated the sectional crisis. Missouri never left the Union, but it was deeply divided. Missouri furnished soldiers to both sides. Missouri’s ambiguous position — neither fully Southern nor fully Northern — reflected the impossible tensions that slavery created in a nation that professed liberty while practicing bondage.
Beyond this deep racial issue, Twain’s writing was also anti-imperialistic. He fiercely opposed U.S. colonialism in the Philippines, calling out the hypocrisy of a nation that preached liberty while conquering others. He was an advocate of free thought and skepticism and distrusted organized religion, dogma, and received wisdom. He championed the right to question authority — religious, political, or social — and scorned hypocrisy wherever he found it. He celebrated ordinary American life, vernacular speech, and working-class experience at a time when literature still largely catered to genteel Eastern tastes. He gave authentic voice to frontier and river culture. He espoused truth-telling over politeness and believed honest observation, even when uncomfortable, was more valuable than social nicety. His humor was always a vehicle for truth, not just entertainment. He opposed mob mentality, conformism, and the cowardice of going along with the crowd. There’s a useful irony in Twain himself: a man full of contradictions. He was commercially ambitious (though woefully ill-prepared) yet idealistic. He aspired to fame and yet was deeply private. His life embodied the tensions he wrote about.
So, imagine my pleasure at seeing the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor being awarded this year to satirist Bill Maher. It’s one of the most prestigious honors in American comedy. The prize recognizes individuals who have had an impact on American society in ways that reflect Mark Twain’s own legacy of using humor to comment on culture, politics, and human nature. The award is named for Twain specifically because he embodied the idea that comedy could carry serious moral and social weight, which connects back to exactly what makes Huckleberry Finn so enduring. Past recipients include Richard Pryor, Jonathan Winters, Whoopi Goldberg, Lilly Tomlin, Steve Martin, Billy Crystal, Neil Simon, Tina Fey, Eddie Murphy, Dave Chappelle, Adam Sandler, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, among others.
Bill Maher is a fellow Cornellian, who was on campus when I went to Cornell (we overlapped two years). I don’t know him, but I admire his satire and commentary. He certainly shares much of the controversial aspects of Twain’s sardonic character. I wonder how Maher will treat the current boycott on Trump-Kennedy Center events? For that matter, I wonder how Twain would treat that currently controversial venue bandying his name about for their own promotion. I suspect he would have said something like, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”