Unlike Ken Burns's Civil War, Mark Twain's was a short one.
Zing. Burnin' the Burns.
Twain trained for two weeks with a Confederate militia which then disbanded, effectively ending his military career. In 1862, his older brother Orion was offered a job as the personal secretary to the territorial governor of Nevada. He asked Twain if he would like to come along as his assistant, and Twain jumped at the chance. "I had never been away from home, and that word 'travel' had a seductive charm for me,"10 Twain wrote in his memoir Roughing It.
The brothers journeyed together to Nevada in a stagecoach, enduring several long, uncomfortable weeks on rough roads. Think The Oregon Trail, but with less dysentery and more "dumb brother hogging all of the blankets."
After a short, failed attempt at silver mining, Twain took a job as city editor for the Virginia City Daily Territorial Enterprise. As a cub reporter, Twain later recalled, he "let fancy get the upper hand of fact too often."11 When the news was slow, he often just made stories up.
After circumstances forced him to leave Nevada—some messy business involving the state's dueling laws—he moved west, traveling through northern California and settling in San Francisco. His travels inspired the short story "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" (later known as "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County") which was published in 1865 in the New York Saturday Press.
The story was a tall tale about a man listening to a tall tale, and it was a tall...er, huge success. Twain was honing his skills as a storyteller, and in doing so, he helped to define the American sense of humor. "To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art,"12 he later said.
Twain later traveled to Hawaii as a reporter for the Alta California, and then to Europe. In 1867, on a journey abroad, he noticed a framed photograph of a fellow passenger's sister. Her name was Olivia "Livy" Langdon, and he insisted on meeting her when they returned to the U.S.
Not creepy at all, Marky Mark.
Once he met her, he was instantly smitten. They corresponded regularly throughout 1868, and though she rejected his first marriage proposal, they were eventually wed in 1870.
Tell us that's not a rom-com in the making. ...Minus the weird, "I command you to introduce me to your sister!" part.
Twain had rather progressive views of women and marriage for his time, believing that a woman should be an equal partner to her husband, instead of subservient.
Yeah, we're bummed out that that was considered "progressive," too.
Twain was quoted as saying, "I don't want to sleep with a threefold being who is a cook, chambermaid, and washer woman all in one,"13 to which Olivia hopefully replied, "any man who expects that probably won't be sleeping with any woman..."
Olivia was an important editor of Twain's work. "I never wrote a serious word until after I married Mrs. Clemens," he said. "She is solely responsible—to her should go the credit—for any influence my subsequent work should exert. After my marriage, she edited everything I wrote."14
You know what they say: behind every great man is a great woman, rolling her eyes and saying, "Mark, you can't write three fart jokes in one chapter, have some self-control."