The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (29 page)

He then went to the Tuolumne foothills to do some mining. It was there that he heard the story of a jumping frog. The story was widely known, but it was new to Clemens, and he took notes for a literary representation of the tale. When the humorist Artemus Ward invited him to contribute something for a book of humorous sketches, Clemens decided to write up the story.
Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog
arrived too late to be included in the volume, but it was published in the New York
Saturday Press
in November 1865 and was subsequently reprinted throughout the country. “Mark Twain” had acquired sudden celebrity, and Sam Clemens was following in his wake.

The next few years were important for Clemens. It appears that he was committed to making a professional career for himself. He continued to write for newspapers, traveling to Hawaii for the Sacramento
Union
and also writing for New York newspapers, but he apparently wanted to become something more than a journalist. He went on his first lecture tour, speaking mostly on the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) in 1866. It was a success, and for the rest of his life, though he found touring grueling, he knew he could
take to the lecture platform when he needed money. His first book was
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches
(1867), but it did not sell well. That same year, he moved to New York City, serving as the traveling correspondent for the San Francisco
Alta California
and for New York newspapers. He had ambitions to enlarge his reputation and his audience, and the announcement of a transatlantic excursion to Europe and the Holy Land provided him with just such an opportunity. The
Alta
paid the substantial fare in exchange for some 50 letters he would write concerning the trip. Eventually his account of the voyage was published as
The Innocents Abroad
(1869). It was a great success.

The trip abroad was fortuitous in another way. He met on the boat a young man named Charlie Langdon, who invited Clemens to dine with his family in New York and introduced him to his sister Olivia; the writer fell in love with her. Clemens's courtship of Olivia Langdon, the daughter of a prosperous businessman from Elmira, N.Y., was an ardent one, conducted mostly through correspondence. They were married in February 1870.

A book about his experiences in the West,
Roughing It
, was published in February 1872 and sold well.
The Gilded Age
(1873), Twain's first attempt at a novel, was remarkably well received and encouraged him to begin writing
Tom Sawyer
, along with his reminiscences about his days as a riverboat pilot. The latter became
Old Times
, which in turn would later become a portion of
Life on the Mississippi
. It described comically, but a bit ruefully too, a way of life that would never return. The highly episodic narrative of
Tom Sawyer
(1876), which recounts the mischievous adventures of a boy growing up along the Mississippi River, was coloured by a nostalgia for childhood and simplicity that would permit Twain to characterize the novel as a “hymn” to childhood.

In the summer of 1876, while staying with his in-laws Susan and Theodore Crane on Quarry Farm overlooking Elmira, Clemens began writing what he called in a letter to his friend William Dean Howells “Huck Finn's Autobiography.” Huck had appeared as a character in
Tom Sawyer
, and Clemens decided that the untutored boy had his own story to tell. He soon discovered that it had to be told in Huck's own vernacular voice.
Huckleberry Finn
was written in fits and starts over an extended period and would not be published until 1885. During that interval, Twain often turned his attention to other projects, only to return again and again to the novel's manuscript. What
distinguishes
Huckleberry Finn
from the other Huck-and-Tom sequels that Twain wrote is the moral dilemma Huck faces in aiding the runaway slave Jim while at the same time escaping from the unwanted influences of so-called civilization. Through Huck, the novel's narrator, Twain was able to address the shameful legacy of chattel slavery prior to the Civil War and the persistent racial discrimination and violence after.

Clemens's travels at home and abroad resulted in several books published during the 1880s. He embarked on a lecture tour in 1884. All the while, however, he continued to make often ill-advised investments. Clemens eventually assigned his property, including his copyrights, to his wife, announced the failure of his publishing house, and declared personal bankruptcy. In 1894, approaching his 60th year, Samuel Clemens was forced to repair his fortunes and remake his career.

Clemens's last years have been described as his “bad mood” period. The description may or may not be apt. His eldest daughter died in 1896, his wife in 1904, and another daughter in 1909. It is true that in his polemical essays and in much of his fiction during this time he was venting powerful moral feelings and commenting freely on the “damn'd human race.” But he had always been against sham and corruption, greed, cruelty, and violence. Some of Twain's best work during his late years was not fiction but polemical essays in which his earnestness was not in doubt: an essay against anti-Semitism,
Concerning the Jews
(1899); a denunciation of imperialism,
To the Man Sitting in Darkness
(1901); and an essay on lynching,
The United States of Lyncherdom
(posthumously published in 1923). Yet this was
also a period during which he received palpable tokens of public approbation in the form of three honorary degrees—from Yale University in 1901, from the University of Missouri in 1902, and, the one he most coveted, from Oxford University in 1907.

More important, a world lecture tour and the publication of
Following the Equator
(1897), which described that tour, combined with shrewd investments of his money, allowed Clemens to pay his creditors in full. He traveled to Bermuda in January 1910. By early April he was having severe chest pains, and he returned to his home in Connecticut, where he died.

(b. April 2, 1840, Paris, France—d. Sept. 28, 1902, Paris)

É
mile Zola, a French critic and political activist, was also the most prominent French novelist of the late 19th century. Raised in straitened circumstances, Zola worked at a Paris publishing house and as a journalist during the 1860s while establishing himself as a fiction writer. Two early novels are
Thérèse Raquin
(1867), a grisly tale of murder and its aftermath, and
Madeleine Férat
(1868), a rather unsuccessful attempt at applying the principles of heredity to the novel.

It was this interest in science that led Zola, in the fall of 1868, to conceive the idea of a large-scale series of novels similar to Honoré de Balzac's
La Comédie humaine
(
The Human Comedy
), which had appeared earlier in the century. Zola's project, originally involving 10 novels, each featuring a different member of the same family, was gradually expanded to comprise the 20 volumes of the
Rougon-Macquart
series.
La Fortune des Rougon
(
The Rougon Family Fortun
e), the first novel in the series, began to appear in serial form in 1870, was interrupted by the outbreak of the
Franco-German War in July, and was eventually published in book form in October 1871. Zola went on to produce these 20 novels—most of which are of substantial length—at the rate of nearly one per year, completing the series in 1893. The series thus constitutes a family saga while providing a valuable sociological document of the events, institutions, and ideas that marked the rise of modern industrialism and the cultural changes it entailed.

As the founder and most celebrated member of the naturalist movement, Zola also published several treatises to explain his theories on art, including
Le Roman expérimental
(1880;
The Experimental Novel
) and
Les Romanciers naturalistes
(1881;
The Naturalist Novelists
). Naturalism, as Zola explained, involves the application to literature of two scientific principles: determinism, or the belief that character, temperament, and, ultimately, behaviour are determined by the forces of heredity, environment, and historical moment; and the experimental method, which entails the objective recording of precise data in controlled conditions.

In 1898 Zola intervened in the Dreyfus Affair—that of a Jewish French army officer whose wrongful conviction for treason in 1894 sparked a 12-year controversy that deeply divided French society. At an early stage in the proceedings Zola had decided, rightly, that Alfred Dreyfus was innocent. On Jan. 13, 1898, in the newspaper
L'Aurore
, Zola published a fierce denunciation of the French general staff in an open letter beginning with the words “J'accuse” (“I accuse”). He charged various high-ranking military officers and, indeed, the War Office itself of concealing the truth in the wrongful conviction of Dreyfus for espionage. Zola was prosecuted for libel and found guilty. In July 1899, when his appeal appeared certain to fail, he fled to England. He returned to France the following June when he learned that the Dreyfus case was to be reopened with a possible
reversal of the original verdict. Zola's intervention in the controversy helped to undermine anti-Semitism and rabid militarism in France.

Zola died unexpectedly in September 1902, the victim of coal gas asphyxiation resulting from a blocked chimney flue. He had produced some 60 volumes of fiction, theory, and criticism, in addition to numerous pieces of journalism, during his 40-year career. At the time of his death, Zola was recognized not only as one of the greatest novelists in Europe but also as a man of action—a defender of truth and justice, a champion of the poor and the persecuted.

(b. April 15, 1843, New York, N.Y., U.S.—d. Feb. 28, 1916, London, Eng.)

H
enry James was an American novelist and, as a naturalized English citizen, a great figure in the transatlantic culture. His fundamental theme was the innocence and exuberance of the New World in clash with the corruption and wisdom of the Old.

He was named for his father, a prominent social theorist and lecturer, and was the younger brother of the pragmatist philosopher William James. They were taken abroad as infants, were schooled by tutors and governesses, and spent their preadolescent years in Manhattan. Returned to Geneva, Paris, and London during their teens, the James children acquired languages and an awareness of Europe few Americans had in their times. When he was 19 years of age Henry enrolled at the Harvard Law School, but he devoted his study time to reading Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Honoré de Balzac, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. His first story appeared anonymously two years later in the New York
Continental Monthly
and his first book reviews in the
North American
Review
. By his mid-20s James was regarded as one of the most skillful writers of short stories in America.

James began his long expatriation in the 1870s, heralded by publication of the novel
Roderick Hudson
(1875), the story of an American sculptor's struggle by the banks of the Tiber between his art and his passions;
Transatlantic Sketches
, his first collection of travel writings; and a collection of tales. With these three substantial books, he inaugurated a career that saw about 100 volumes through the press during the next 40 years.

In 1878 he achieved international renown with his story of an American flirt in Rome,
Daisy Miller
, and further advanced his reputation with
The Europeans
that same year. James's reputation was founded on his versatile studies of “the American girl,” and he ended this first phase of his career by producing his masterpiece,
The Portrait of a Lady
(1881), a study of a young woman from Albany who brings to Europe her narrow provincialism and pretensions but also her sense of her own sovereignty, her “free spirit,” her refusal to be treated, in the Victorian world, merely as a marriageable object. As a picture of Americans moving in the expatriate society of England and of Italy, this novel has no equal in the history of modern fiction.

Subsequent works were many. In
The Bostonians
(1886) and
The Princess Casamassima
(1886), his subjects were social reformers and revolutionaries. In
The Spoils of Poynton
(1897),
What Maisie Knew
(1897), and
The Turn of the Screw
(1898), he made use of complex moral and psychological ambiguity.
The Wings of the Dove
(1902),
The Ambassadors
(1903), and
The Golden Bowl
(1904) were the great novels of the final phase of his career, all showing a small group of characters in a tense situation, with a retrospective working out, through multiple angles of vision, of their drama. In these late works James resorted to an
increasingly allusive prose style, which became dense and charged with symbolic imagery.