Mark Twain Wrote the First Book Ever Written With a Typewriter

My Pen­guin Clas­sics copy of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mis­sis­sip­pi 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 Mis­sis­sip­pi.

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.

The year after Twain’s moral trou­ble with his Rem­ing­ton, Tom Sawyer is pub­lished from hand­writ­ten man­u­script, not typed. Then, sev­en years lat­er, Life on the Mis­sis­sip­pi (1883) comes to the pub­lish­er in type­script. Twain did not type it himself—he had pre­sum­ably renounced the act—but he dic­tat­ed the mem­oir to a typ­ist from a hand­writ­ten draft. Now, I can hear you quib­bling…  Life on the Mis­sis­sip­pi isn’t a nov­el at all! Well, okay, fair enough. Let’s just say it’s the first type­writ­ten book and call it a day, eh? Go read this excel­lent New York­er piece on the ear­ly life of the type­writer and leave me alone. I’ve got a book to fin­ish.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2013.

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