Traveling with Twain

St. Louis, Missouri’s largest city with a population of 60,000 by the time Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) arrived in June 1853, was described by Huck in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as “the whole world lit up.” The growing city’s river and railroad work attracted immigrants, mainly Irish and Germans. Twain worked as a printer for the Evening News and other local papers. His small-town typesetting skills were dismissed by a St. Louis printer as error-filled: “He could not have set up an advertisement in acceptable form to save his life.” St. Louis printers proudly proclaimed themselves able to guzzle more red whisky than most men. But Twain, the abstemious abstainer, saved his money for a trip east in August 1853. He wrote to his mother: “Well, I was out of work in St. Louis, and didn’t fancy loafing in such a dry place, where there is no pleasure to be seen without paying well for it, and so I thought I might as well go to New York.”

September 23-September 26