Samuel Clemens had at least two more head readings. He might have done the 1884 reading in Cincinnati for the publicity since he was on a lecture tour. The second was in Manhattan in 1901, and it could have been to gather material for his novel Eddypus. These head readings were published. Unsurprisingly, they accounted for all Mark Twain’s known traits and “sanguine” (now presented as “mental-motive”) temperament. We also see how Twain continued to use phrenological terms and ideas to make his verbal portraits even more memorable. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, for example, he brings up “what slavery could do, in the way of ossifying what one may call the superior lobe of human feeling.” Phrenology can also be found in lesser-read works, including A Double Barrelled Detective Story, his spoof on Sherlock Holmes. The remainder of Chapter 7 presents what Lorenzo Fowler’s surviving daughter wrote about Mark Twain and his head in 1904 and what was written about him when he died in 1910, including how he “only wrote in a humorous way to make people sit up and take notice of what he wanted to tell them.”

Mark Twain now began to lampoon the head readers as cheats and frauds. He first did this in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which appeared in 1876, and continued to do so in its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which appeared eight years later. He described Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly as a believer in “phrenological frauds” and as “an easy victim” in the first of these often-paired novels. More telling, he explained how they operated in Huckleberry Finn, using a phony duke and king bilking unsuspecting victims along the Mississippi River for this purpose. These two characters mention how they rely on gathering advance information for some of their schemes, and they brag about putting on charades. As they saw it, phrenology was an easy-entry business that anyone with a good set of eyes and ears along with some acting skills could exploit. This chapter also presents Twain’s use of phrenology in Life on the Mississippi, a book he completed in 1883 after returning to St. Louis and to relive the river between it and New Orleans.

Neither Holmes nor Clemens was rejecting everything about phrenology. They were most concerned about phrenology’s craniological tenets – the unsubstantiated idea that small bumps and depressions on the skull can reliably reflect the growth and development of underlying parcels of brain tissue and reveal the organs of mind. They did, however, seem to accept the concept of many independent organs of mind, though not necessarily the ones listed by Gall or others. They also bought into the idea that the front of the brain is more intellectual than its posterior. Additionally, they agreed that character traits are inborn, stable, and run in families and that juries should consider the state of a criminal’s brain. Moreover, neither man had any use for metaphysics. Interestingly, Holmes saw phrenology as a branch of anthropology (broadly defined). As he put it: “Strike out the false pretensions of phrenology, call it anthropology; let it study man the individual in distinction from man the abstraction … and it becomes the proper study of mankind, one of the noblest and most interesting of pursuits.” Twain was also fascinated by the diversity he observed among his fellow human beings, and also felt the family of man deserved further study.

Samuel Clemens, later adopt to write under “Mark Twain,” spent his formative years in Hannibal, Missouri, a town on the Mississippi River. After his father died, he began working for printers. While just a teenager, he carefully observed various performers stopping in the town. He was especially taken by a mesmerist and tried to become his assistant. After failing to become hypnotized, he faked being in a trance and fooled everyone by “reading” the audience to guess what the mesmerist was compelling him to do and gathering advance information about people he would mention in his trance. This experience might have made him suspicious of the itinerant phrenologist he watched in 1850, one of many now visiting small towns. The townsfolk flocked to him and adored him. But what most registered on young Clemens was how the phrenologist was giving every client a glowing report, as if each was another George Washington. This observation made him wonder if there were anything to the head readings or whether the phrenologist was just out to dupe his clients. Still, he recognized that phrenology might be a quick and helpful way to judge character and of use to a writer.

Holmes and Clemens wanted to educate the public about the head reading fad. But Clemens was taking on a less controversial topic when Mark Twain began to assail the head readers during the 1870s. By this time, Paul Broca had shown that the clinical-pathological method could delineate a brain region for fluent speech. Further, Fritsch and Hitzig in Germany and David Ferrier in England were now discovering special forebrain areas for voluntary movements, the different sensory systems, and even higher functions by stimulating different parts of the brain in animals and making lesions. Holmes did not recognize these better ways to understand the mind and brain when he began to lampoon phrenology in 1859. Thus, there was a great scientific divide separating what Holmes and Clemens did, even though both men shared similar objectives and helped take the luster out of head readings. I conclude with the thoughts that popular literature can be a valuable tool for appreciating scientific and medical developments, and that Holmes and Clemens were right not to paint with too broad a brush. True, phrenological craniology deserved to be ridiculed, but phrenology also had positive features that would become fundamental tenets of psychology and the neurosciences.

Samuel Clemens left Hannibal for more promising St. Louis in 1853, where he continued to work in the printing trade. In his notebook from 1855, he mentioned how he was reading George Sumner Weaver’s phrenology book. He was so enthralled with it that he copied parts and the skull diagram into his notebook. In 1857, he became a riverboat pilot, a far more exciting and lucrative job. When the Civil War ended river traffic from the North to New Orleans, he headed west with his older brother, now secretary for the Nevada territory. He now began to write for local newspapers, presenting himself as “Mark Twain.” He next tried mining and writing in California, where his hilarious jumping frog story from 1865 was his first nationally acclaimed piece. It led to commissions for pieces on the people and places he would now see, including Hawaii, Europe, and the Middle East. He would present some of his experiences in his travel books, including The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It. He used phrenological terms, concepts, and portraits in these works, even poking phrenological fun at himself. He did not, however, denigrate phrenology or the head readers in these works.

The extent to which Holmes opened Clemens’s eyes about the head readers as frauds, served as his leading guide into the pseudo-science of phrenology, and provided a template for him to lampoon the head readers is addressed in this chapter. Three questions are asked. First, was Clemens familiar with Holmess writings? Second, did he meet Holmes? And third, is there evidence to suggest that Clemens “borrowed” some of Holmess ideas and humorous ways of presenting his thoughts about the head readers and their so-called science? Each of these questions is answered in the affirmative using the letters they exchanged, showing when they met, and by examining their writings. Most notable is how Mark Twain used the same two-column structure that Holmes had used in 1859 to present what the head reader was telling a client but really thinking. This chapter is particularly important because Holmes has not been recognized for having such an influence on Clemens/Twain. Nor had it been shown how Mark Twain borrowed rather freely from Holmes. Then again, scant little has been published on Clemens’s/Mark Twain’s forays into phrenology and there is nothing on Holmes and the head readers.

Clemens must have continued to have his doubts about the head readers into the 1870s, because he decided to conduct an experiment of his own on a leading head reader in 1872. Having discovered some of the tricks mediums were using, he made two trips to Lorenzo Fowler’s phrenological emporium in London. He dressed and acted like a nobody during the first trip. Then, after some weeks had passed, he returned and presented himself as the famous American humorist and author Mark Twain. He would later describe his great awakening in a short but serious published letter, and with humor and artistic liberties in an autobiographical dictation and his posthumous but never-completed novel Eddypus. The letter and phrenological parts of his dictation and Eddypus are presented in this chapter. Being told on his first visit that his head had a cavity above the organ for a sense of humor and on his second that he had a Mount Everest in the same spot would change how he would depict the head readers in his most famous novels. Writing as Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens would now set forth to educate the gullible public.

Mark Twain mirrored the complex racial changes of the American nineteenth century. His father owned a few slaves, and he grew up in a slaveholding community, with slavery seen as an accepted practice, endorsed by the government and the church. His exposure to the slaves on his Uncle Quarles’s farm in Florida, Missouri, had a lifelong effect on him and on his work. In his young life, he wrote some letters that show the racist attitudes he was exposed to in the pre-Civil War south, but as he matured, his racism gave way to empathy and understanding of the black experience. His 1874 short story “A True Story” began his use of black vernacular voices in his fiction, culminating in antislavery novels like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Puddn’head Wilson. In his private life, he secretly paid a black man’s tuition to Yale Law School, as well as other charitable acts. He was a friend and supporter of Frederick Douglass as well as Booker T. Washington and other black figures.

Mark Twain lived in an era of profound scientific and technological change, in which he was very interested. He followed the debate over evolution, with wide reading in Darwin and other scientists. He also kept up with advances in geology, and he was involved in geological and archeological digs. He was an avid reader in natural history, with a special interest in insects. His interest in science found its way into his writing, such as the key use of fingerprinting in Pudd’nhead Wilson, and especially in his late unpublished writing, when he contrasted science with religion. Twain was keenly interested in technology and inventions, and he was an early adopter of inventions like the typewriter, the telephone (he claimed to have the first telephone in a private residence), and the bicycle, among others. He was a friend to both Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla, visiting Tesla’s laboratory to be involved with experiments in electricity, and allowing Edison to both record his voice and film him with his moving camera.

Twain’s two most important contemporaries were William Dean Howells and Henry James. Howells was a friend and champion of both writers, although Twain and James expressed distaste toward each other. Each in his own way was an important figure in the emerging literary realism. Although Twain claimed that he preferred reading history and biography over novels and literature, he was an avid reader of his contemporaries’ works, even if he often criticized them. Harriet Beecher Stowe was his next-door neighbor, and he entertained fellow writers in his Hartford mansion. Twain was a champion of some younger writers, although he wearied at the constant demands for advice and help from emerging writers.

The 1960s saw several seminal works of Twain criticism, including Henry Nash Smith’s Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer, Walter Blair’s study of Huckleberry Finn, and James M. Cox’s Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor. The publication in 1962 of Letters from the Earth and other late writings that had been suppressed by Twain’s daughter Clara brought a complete reappraisal of the author. Justin Kaplan’s 1967 biography, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, was influenced by the split Van Wyck Brooks had earlier argued for, and other biographies have followed, a dozen or more since that time. All of Twain’s major works have received book-length treatment, and thousands of critical articles have been published, most notably on Huckleberry Finn, with his work being treated by all the major theoretical movements of the last half-century. The Mark Twain critical industry continues to thrive.

Mark Twain was a central figure in the prevailing literary movements of the second half of the nineteenth century: realism and naturalism. His friend William Dean Howells was the leading proponent of realism in American literature, and in Mark Twain he early saw a writer who would join him in his efforts to move literature beyond romanticism. Howells, Twain, and Henry James were the three most prominent figures, but other writers were also important. Although Twain did not write literary criticism that outlined his philosophy of realism, his practice was important in establishing realism as the prevailing literary movement of the time.

The four most important Mark Twain centers in America are the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, Hannibal, Missouri; the Mark Twain House and Museum, Hartford, Connecticut; the Center for Mark Twain Studies, Elmira, New York; and the Mark Twain Papers, Berkeley, California. The Boyhood Home is a restoration of the Clemens home in Hannibal, and Hannibal itself is dedicated to Twain’s life and work, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The museum has artifacts from Twain’s life, as well as exhibits on the history of slaveholding in Hannibal. The Mark Twain House and Museum includes a painstakingly accurate restoration of the sumptuous Hartford mansion where Sam and Olivia Clemens raised their three daughters, as well as a museum and teaching center. The Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College includes the octagonal study where Twain wrote many of his best works while spending summers with his sister-in-law, as well as a large library, and Quarry Farm, the hillside house where the Clemens family summered in the 1870s and 1880s. The Mark Twain Papers at the University of California, Berkeley houses the largest collection of Twain manuscripts, letters, and other documents, with editors who continue their work of producing definitive editions of Twain’s works. The center also welcomes scholars for research in the archives.

Samuel Clemens was born in 1835 in Missouri. He spent his childhood by the Mississippi River in Hannibal, Missouri. He was a printer’s apprentice, then was a journeyman printer, then earned a pilot’s license on the Mississippi River. He went west to Nevada, avoiding the Civil War, then became a newspaper writer. In February 1863, he signed an article with the pen name “Mark Twain,” beginning the creation of his alter ego. His 1867 trip to Europe and the Holy Land led to his travel book The Innocents Abroad. Upon his return to America, he met Olivia Langdon in Elmira, New York, and they married in 1870. A son, Langdon, died in infancy, but Sam and Livy had three daughters: Susie, Clara, and Jean. Most summers were spent in Elmira, where Twain composed many of his most famous works, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He turned his attention to business adventures, including starting his own publishing company, but also a series of investments, most of which ended in failure. In his last decade, he increasingly spoke out about politics. He died in 1910, his popularity assured by his works and his public persona.

Mark Twain’s politics changed over time, and people of all political persuasions find in his writing statements to corroborate their views. He was at some times conservative, but he also identified himself as a radical. The presidential election of 1884 was an important turning point in his politics. Although he was a Republican, he publicly broke with his party to support the Democratic nominee, Grover Cleveland, over the Republican nominee, James G. Blaine, whom he considered a corrupt politician. Joining the independent “Mugwumps,” he spoke at rallies in favor of Cleveland, who won a narrow election. In the 1890s and 1900s, Twain became increasingly outspoken, opposing the foreign policies of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, who once called Twain “the most dangerous man in America.”

Journalism was central to Mark Twain’s career as a writer. Before he was a reporter, he was a typesetter, a “printer’s devil,” beginning at age thirteen in his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, but leading him to work in Keokuk, Iowa, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and New York, the combination of travel and work extremely important in his formative years. His work as a printer’s devil exposed him to the journalism of his time, which was actually national because of the practice of liberally reprinting stories from other papers. He began his writing career as a journalist, in Nevada and California, combining straight reporting with anarchic humor, following in the tradition of freewheeling journalism in the Far West. Twain’s newspaper writing served as an important apprenticeship for him, as well as establishing his persona. “Mark Twain” was born in the journalism of Virginia City, Nevada, and San Francisco.

The second half of the nineteenth century was a golden age of lecturing and speeches, and Mark Twain established himself as one of the most popular lecturers and speakers of his time. Throughout the country, there was a wide network of speakers on religion, culture, social issues, literature, and the arts. Twain first gave lectures in the late 1860s, and he returned to the lecture circuit when he needed money or when he was touting a new book, as he did in his 1884-85 lecture tour with George Washington Cable, which covered the Northeast and Midwest for over four months and thousands of miles. When he declared bankruptcy in the 1890s, his around-the-world lecture tour allowed him to pay off his debts in full, as well as to further spread his international reputation. He had a command of the stage and the audience that was gripping, eliciting riotous laughter, but also making people think about his comic but often acerbic comments on a variety of subjects.

Mark Twain was an avid student of history. He was especially interested in European history, with reading in Lecky and other historians. He used his interest in history in historical fiction like The Prince and the Pauper and Joan of Arc, and his perceptions about history guided his observations about his own time, notably in his late polemical writings, where he saw parallels between European and American imperialism and earlier eras.