Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Written With a Typewriter

"My Pen­guin Clas­sics copy of Mark Twain's Life on the Mis­sis­pi­pi sits alone atop an over­full shelf. There is a book­mark on page 204, exact­ly halfway through, torn from an in-flight duty-free catalog-whiskey and fan­cy pens. It tells me "hey, you for­got to fin­ish this, you [var­i­ous obscen­i­ties]." And I shrug. What can I say? I went to grad school, where I learned to read ten books at once and nev­er fin­ish one. Good thing Mark Twain didn't write that way, or we might not have Life on the Mis­sis­pi."

"Twain was a dili­gent and con­sci­en­tious writer with a mem­o­ry like a bear trap, or at least that's what he want­ed us to think. But some­where in his rem­i­nis­cence he may have been con­fused. Twain wrote in his 1904 auto­bi­og­ra­phy that his first nov­el writ­ten on a type­writer-the first type­writ­ten nov­el at all-was Tom Sawyer. Was this so?"

"Twain pur­chased his first type­writer (which prob­a­bly looked like the Sholes and Glid­den seen here) in 1874 for $125. In 1875, he writes in a let­ter to the Rem­ing­ton com­pa­ny that he is no longer using his type­writer; it cor­rupts his morals because it makes him want to swear. He gives the infer­nal machine away, twice. It returns to him each time."

A Penguin Classics copy of Life on the Mississippi sits half-read with a torn in-flight-catalog bookmark at page 204. The narrator notes a habit of starting many books and finishing few. Mark Twain bought his first typewriter in 1874 for $125 and reported in 1875 that the machine corrupted his morals, making him want to swear; he twice gave it away and it returned to him. Twain later claimed in 1904 that Tom Sawyer was his first typewritten novel, but Tom Sawyer was published from a handwritten manuscript. Life on the Mississippi (1883) reached the publisher as a typescript dictated to a typist.

Read at Open Culture