Great American Writers in Their Time
Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1987) and Mark Twain (1835-1910)
A Critical Comparison
These are some thoughts on two great authors who, though being children of different times have many things in common.
For Robert A. Heinlein's biography
Mark Twain's Biography
Mark Twain, or what was his true name, Samuel
Langhorne Clemens, was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835. He
moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a Mississippi river port, at age four where
he got a public school education.
He worked as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, eventually, until the Civil War brought an end to travel on the river.
In 1861 he volunteered as a soldier with the Confederate cavalry in an irregular company.
Some months later, he went to the newly created Nevada Territory. He took to silver mining, as did Robert Heinlein, for a short period of time. It was in 1862 when he started work with a newspaper. He became a reporter on the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada. In 1863 he signed his articles with the pseudonym Mark Twain (meaning two fathoms deep).
In 1864 he moved to San Francisco. His tale from the California gold fields, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County became known nationwide.
In 1867 Twain went to NYC, lectured there, and later visited Europe and the Holy Land. The Innocents Abroad appeared in 1869, burlesquing those European cultural aspects that impress American tourists.
In 1870 he married Olivia
In 1884 he formed the publishing firm
Charles L. Webster and Company for his own works as well as other writers'
books. In 1894 an investment in an automatic typesetting machine led
eventually to the firm's bankruptcy.
In the following years, there were growing
pessimism and bitterness in his works as a result of his business
reverses. Worsening things for him were the deaths of his wife and
two daughters later. Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) was a novel about
miscegenation and murder, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
(1896) was a sentimental biography.
Things in Common
Both authors were born in the state of Missouri,
Hannibal being situated about 200 miles east of Kansas City.
In the course of the next years they dealt with different things before finding their definite writing profession. It's quite remarkable that Heinlein as well as Twain took to silver mining for some time.
Twain having been working with journals
as a printer before, succeeded in getting to writing, as a reporter at the
beginning, while Heinlein, at age 31, made his way through the backdoor
after studies in science, by means of science fiction, a subdivision
of pulp fiction then, at age 31. His nationwide fame as a writer other
than a genre writer came with his publishing with the Saturday Evening Post
in 1947, at age 39.
Writing novels for young people, both
authors were successful in that field. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry
Finn have been classic American characters for generation after
generation to grow up ever since.
Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee
in King Arthur's Court was his closest approach to what is called
science fiction by now. The Prince and the Pauper has fantasy
Even though there are some remarkable similarities in the lifelines of Robert A. Heinlein and Mark Twain, there are a lot more differences.
Robert Heinlein had a lifelong unhappy love affair with the military. It was hard for him that he couldn't proceed in rank, that he even had to be discharged from service because of disease. While working at the US Naval Air Experimental Center in Philadelphia during World War II, he tried to regain military rank and uniform, but felt somewhat humilitated on denial. Mark Twain just served a few months with the cavalry in Civil War.
Unlike Mark Twain, Robert A. Heinlein
tended to change his opinion in the course of the years. At the start of
his writing career he seemed to be a liberal. After his divorce, being
newly wed to Virginia, he turned out to be very conservative. He didn't
mind McCarthyism, he thought it to be inevitable whilst there was a
worldwide bipolarization between communism and the free world. You
may read about his thoughts in A Tramp Royale. In the decades to come,
Heinlein proves to be a dedicated follower of the zeitgeist. Bob Heinlein's
writing kept in tune with times up to the 1980s, from the beginning of the
sexual revolution in the 1960s up to soft-porn-like writing while in his
last years. In the 1960s he played a role in the development of the
counterculture (Stranger in a Strange Land).
Though both men were great American authors
in their time, and their lifelines seem somewhat similar at first glance,
there are even more things completely different about them.