Mark Twain

The Twain family’s first full year in Europe (1891 to 1892) found Twain driving himself to earn fast cash with The American Claimant—a hastily expanded Colonel Sellers tale written in 71 days and sold to McClure’s. Twain also dashed off the pot-boiler Tom Sawyer Abroad. 

Amid this spasmodic work, Twain’s rheumatism forced dictation experiments, and family finances remained precarious as Villa Viviani’s elegance proved costly. Livy’s heart and intestinal ailments worsened. Clara pursued studying piano in Berlin, provoking Twain’s anxious lectures on propriety, while Susy, adrift, studied voice in Florence while secretly nursing romantic turmoil. Despite sunsets over Florence and celebrity visits, money fears, illness, and parental tensions shadowed the apparent idyll.

In 1893, financial calamity struck. Charles L. Webster & Co. collapsed under debts from the Library of American Literature, leaving Twain personally liable. The Paige typesetter still devoured funds without producing results. Twain scrambled to secure advances, sell copyrights, and negotiate new contracts while enduring depression, insomnia, and chest pain. Attempts to rein in Fred Hall failed, and banker Charles Perkins demanded immediate repayment of $70,000. Twain privately conceded he was not his strongest suit. 

Although Clara thrived musically in Berlin, Livy’s health worsened, and the family returned to Florence as creditors closed in. Bankruptcy now loomed as the only way out.

Chernow chronicles Mark Twain’s tumultuous 1894, when hopes for financial salvation again dissolved. Twain labored in New York with tycoon Henry H. Rogers to rescue both the Paige typesetter and the failing publishing house, while Livy struggled in Paris to manage her own frail health and eldest daughter Susy’s deepening melancholy. 

Rogers secured a temporary lifeline, but the Chicago trial of the Paige compositor proved disastrous: The complex machine broke down repeatedly, dashing Twain’s decade-long dream of vast royalties. Webster & Company collapsed into bankruptcy, Livy was engulfed by shame, and the family accepted that their grand Hartford life was gone for good.

Amid bankruptcy and the Paige machine’s collapse, Twain relocated his family to Paris, where gout, tight finances and constant rain deepened his dislike of the city. He nevertheless remained productive, publishing the fierce essay “In Defense of Harriet Shelley,” befriending prodigies Helen Keller and Nikola Tesla, and recasting an abandoned farce into Pudd’nhead Wilson, a detective novel that attacks enslavement and relies on fingerprints for its climax. 

While Livy’s health steadied and Susy tentatively resumed singing lessons, lingering debts forced austere living and prompted plans for Twain to embark on an around-the-world lecture tour. A solitary visit to the long-vacant Hartford house reminded Twain of the life his misadventures had cost.

Chernow follows the start of Twain’s round-the-world lecture tour, undertaken in 1895 and 1896 to raise cash after Webster & Co.’s bankruptcy. Hampered by gout and a painful carbuncle, he nonetheless crossed the northern United States with Livy and Clara, appearing in 21 cities before sailing from Vancouver. Major James B. Pond arranged the trip and became both companion and comic foil. 

Crowds greeted Twain rapturously, reaffirming his popularity and bolstering his health, while reporters chronicled each stop. Behind the ovations, legal wrangles with printers and lingering debts continued to shadow him, and Susy, left behind in Elmira, felt acute loneliness and regret.

After leaving smoky Vancouver in August 1895, Twain, Livy, and Clara crossed the Pacific on the steamer Warrimoo, barred from cholera-stricken Honolulu but dazzled by equatorial seas. In Australia and New Zealand Twain’s dead-pan performances packed theatres, though recurring carbuncles, heat, and cockroaches tested his health. Rail and coastal voyages exposed him to sheep stations, Aboriginal history, and Māori craft, widening his sympathy for colonized peoples. India overwhelmed him with color, poverty, and imperial contradictions: Twain praised Bombay’s splendor but attacked missionary hypocrisy and caste brutality. All the while, Twain’s lecture receipts were forwarded home to reduce debts as the party sailed west toward South Africa.

Chernow presents the final, African leg of Twain’s world lecture tour. In Durban Twain fretted over debt and illness while Livy and Clara waited behind. Travelling inland, he entertained Johannesburg reporters from bed, then blundered politically by joking to Boer-held “Reformers,” prompting harsher rations until he placated President Paul Kruger. 

Exhausted, Twain still filled halls across the Rand and Cape Colony, marveled at veld vistas, and condemned Cecil Rhodes’s rapacity even while defending British rule. Sailing for England on July 15, 1896, he felt proud to have circumnavigated the globe, yet a fresh accounting showed that he still owed $70,000, which plunged him back into despair.

In summer 1896, the Twain family was back in England, confident the lecture tour had earned a family reunion. Susy stayed in Hartford to strengthen her voice, embracing Mental Science and postponing medical help when fever struck. She soon developed bacterial meningitis, and local doctors arrived too late to treat her. Livy and Clara raced home by ship, unaware that Susy had died on August 18, attended by Jean, Katy Leary and relatives. 

Twain, alone in Guildford, received the cable announcing Susy’s “release” and collapsed into guilt-ridden anguish, blaming his debts, the tour, negligent helpers—and himself. Reunited in London, the family retreated to a Chelsea flat, their future darkened by grief and lingering financial worry.

Crushed by Susy’s death yet still burdened by Webster & Co. debts, Twain threw himself into Following the Equator (1897). Working “day and night” in the Chelsea flat, he turned the tour’s notes—polished by Livy’s strict edits—into a sprawling travelogue that mixed satire, anti-imperialist criticism, and the new “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar” aphorisms. 

Sales proved modest, but the book, the Uniform Edition launch, and smaller fiction pieces were Twain’s only source of income. A grotesque New York Herald “relief fund” and a garbled cable (“Reports of my death…” [407]) exposed Twain’s precarious finances and fame. Twain’s private life remained fraught as well, as Livy, Clara, and Jean mourned while Twain oscillated between furious self-reproach and weary resignation.

In summer 1897 the Twain family withdrew to Villa Bühlegg in Weggis, Switzerland. The Alpine calm briefly relieved their grief, yet the first anniversary of Susy’s death (“August 18”) weighed heavily upon them: Livy spent the day alone rereading Susy’s letters, while Twain composed a public elegy and drafted the fierce meditation “In My Bitterness,” blaming a capricious God. 

Twain continued to be productive, producing new stories (“Hellfire Hotchkiss”), the bleak hometown sketches “Villagers of 1840-3,” and the satirical fragment “Letters to Satan.” While the family enjoyed a visit from the Fisk Jubilee Singers, their anxiety swiftly returned as 17-year-old Jean’s epilepsy intensified, requiring constant medical supervision. In September the family relocated to Vienna for Clara’s musical studies and specialist care for Jean.

During the family’s 1897-98 stay in Vienna, Twain plunged into public life while private worries persisted. He lampooned German at a raucous Concordia-Club banquet, then watched the Reichsrat dissolve into fist-fights and police raids—experiences recast in his article “Stirring Times in Austria.” 

Confronting the city’s virulent antisemitism, Twain praised the French writer Emile Zola who had written “J’Accuse” in support of Dreyfus during the Dreyfus Affair. Twain befriended Jewish writers, and drafted “Concerning the Jews,” lauding Jewish resilience yet unwittingly recycling stereotypes. At home, Livy nursed Jean through worsening epilepsy, and Clara abandoned piano for vocal training after daunting lessons with Theodor Leschetizky. Clara also met virtuoso Ossip Gabrilowitsch.

In late 1897, Twain mourned his brother Orion’s death while still in Vienna. Early 1898 brought some financial relief to Twain: Thanks to royalties and Henry Rogers’s stewardship, he finished repaying the $70,000 Webster-Paige debt four years ahead of schedule, delighting Livy and creditors alike. 

However, elation soon turned to fresh speculative fever: Dazzled by Jan Szczepanik, “the European Edison,” Twain tried—unsuccessfully—to sell US rights to the inventor’s textile-printing “Raster” machine and even dreamed of a global trust. Chastened, he channeled cynicism into art, drafting the scathing tale “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” and coining ever-darker epigrams that exposed greed, self-interest, and waning faith.

Living in fin-de-siècle Vienna, Twain became engrossed by the split between wakeful and “dream” selves. He filled notebooks with vivid nightmares, stage-fright reveries, erotic yet chaste encounters with a perpetual 15-year-old “Platonic Sweetheart,” and cosmic parables such as “Which Was the Dream?” and “The Great Dark,” each echoing his bankruptcy, Susy’s death, and fears of irretrievable loss. 

The city’s ferment also spurred him to draft the skeptical dialogue What Is Man?, converse on paper with a suavely sardonic Satan, and declare altruism a self-delusion. Even as he experimented with these interior dramas, he followed world events, initially cheering, then questioning, the United States’ war with Spain.

In spring 1899 Twain, Livy, and their daughters accepted a lavish invitation to Budapest for the jubilee of Hungarian press freedom, where Twain’s extemporaneous German-language speech and the family’s celebrity drew rapt crowds. 

Throughout their final Vienna months, the family mingled with Habsburg royalty, witnessed a spectacular military pageant, and later joined the city’s mass mourning after Empress Elisabeth’s assassination in Geneva. Financially solvent again through Henry Rogers’s investments, the Twain family planned to quit Austria. 

In London a chance meeting led Twain to Swedish osteopath J. H. Kellgren: At his remote Sanna sanitarium the whole family underwent treatment, and Jean’s epilepsy showed its first marked improvement in years.

After promising signs in Sweden, Twain moved the family to London so Jean could continue Dr. Kellgren’s osteopathic treatments while Clara studied singing. The family’s initial faith in a six-month “cure” soured as seizures returned and Livy endured the doctor’s painful manipulations; meanwhile, Twain discovered the same method had long existed as American osteopathy. 

Torn between homesickness and dread of a Susy-less Hartford, the Twain family debated where to settle, even trying to sell their old house. Financial worries resurfaced, while Twain sunk fresh capital into the miracle food Plasmon. 

The Boer War darkened London, while Twain’s private writings—calling humanity a “bastard” species—revealed deepening gloom. The family prepared for an autumn 1900 voyage back to the United States.