The 100 Most Influential Writers of All Time (28 page)

In those years Dickinson experienced a painful and obscure personal crisis, partly of a romantic nature. The abject and pleading drafts of her second and third letters to the unidentified person she called “Master” are probably related to her many poems about a loved but distant person, usually male. Whoever the person was, Master's failure to return Dickinson's affection—together with Susan's absorption in her first childbirth and Bowles's growing invalidism—contributed to a piercing and ultimate sense of distress. Instead of succumbing to anguish, however, she came to view it as the sign of a special vocation, and it became the basis of an unprecedented creativity.

In April 1862, about the time Wadsworth left the East Coast for a pastorate in San Francisco, Dickinson sought the critical advice of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, whose witty article of advice to writers,
A Letter to a Young Contributor
, had just appeared in
The Atlantic Monthly
. Higginson was known as a writer of delicate nature essays and a crusader for women's rights. Enclosing four poems, Dickinson asked for his opinion of her verse—whether or
not it was “alive.” The ensuing correspondence lasted for years, with the poet sending her “preceptor,” as she called him, many more samples of her work. In addition to seeking an informed critique from a professional but not unsympathetic man of letters, she was reaching out at a time of accentuated loneliness.

Dickinson's last trips from Amherst were in 1864 and 1865, when she shared her cousins Louisa and Frances Norcross's boardinghouse in Cambridge and underwent a course of treatment with the leading Boston ophthalmologist. She described her symptoms as an aching in her eyes and a painful sensitivity to light. In 1869 Higginson invited the poet to Boston to attend a literary salon; she refused the offer. When Higginson visited her the next year, he recorded his vivid first impression of her “plain” features, “exquisitely” neat attire, “childlike” manner, and loquacious and exhausting brilliance. He was “glad not to live near her.”

In her last 15 years Dickinson averaged 35 poems a year and conducted her social life mainly through her chiselled and often sibylline written messages. Her father's sudden death in 1874 caused a profound and persisting emotional upheaval yet eventually led to a greater openness, self-possession, and serenity. She repaired an 11-year breach with Samuel Bowles and made friends with Maria Whitney, a teacher of modern languages at Smith College, and Helen Hunt Jackson, poet and author of the novel
Ramona
(1884). Dickinson resumed contact with Wadsworth, and from about age 50 she conducted a passionate romance with Otis Phillips Lord, an elderly judge on the supreme court of Massachusetts. The letters she apparently sent Lord reveal her at her most playful, alternately teasing and confiding. In declining an erotic advance or his proposal of marriage, she asked, “Dont
you know you are happiest while I withhold and not confer—dont you know that ‘No' is the wildest word we consign to Language?”

After Dickinson's aging mother was incapacitated by a stroke and a broken hip, caring for her at home made large demands on the poet's time and patience. The deaths of Dickinson's friends in her last years left her feeling terminally alone. But the single most shattering death, occurring in 1883, was that of her eight-year-old nephew next door. Her health broken by this culminating tragedy, she ceased seeing almost everyone, apparently including her sister-in-law. The poet died in 1886, when she was 55 years old. The immediate cause of death was a stroke.

Only 10 of Emily Dickinson's nearly 1,800 poems are known to have been published in her lifetime. She habitually worked in verse forms suggestive of hymns and ballads, with lines of three or four stresses. Her unusual off-rhymes have been seen as both experimental and influenced by the 18th-century hymnist Isaac Watts. She freely ignored the usual rules of versification and even of grammar, and in the intellectual content of her work she likewise proved exceptionally bold and original. Her verse is distinguished by its epigrammatic compression, haunting personal voice, enigmatic brilliance, and lack of high polish.

(b. Jan. 27, 1832, Daresbury, Cheshire, Eng.—d. Jan. 14, 1898, Guildford, Surrey)

L
ewis Carroll, the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was a English logician, mathematician, photographer, and novelist who is especially remembered for
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
(1865) and its sequel,
Through the Looking-Glass
(1871).

Dodgson excelled in his mathematical and classical studies at the Christ Church, Oxford, which he entered as an undergraduate in 1851; he proceeded to a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1854. He was made a “senior student” (called a fellow in other colleges) and appointed lecturer in mathematics in 1855, a post he resigned in 1881. As was the case with all fellowships at that time, the studentship was dependent upon his remaining unmarried, and, by the terms of this particular endowment, proceeding to holy orders. Dodgson was ordained a deacon in the Church of England on Dec. 22, 1861. Had he gone on to become a priest he could have married and would then have been appointed to a parish by the college. But he felt himself unsuited for parish work and decided that he was perfectly content to remain a bachelor.

Dodgson's association with children grew naturally enough out of his position as an eldest son with eight younger brothers and sisters. He also suffered from a bad stammer (which he never wholly overcame) and found that he was able to speak naturally and easily to children. It is therefore not surprising that he should begin to entertain the children of Henry George Liddell, dean of Christ Church. Alice Liddell and her sisters Lorina and Edith were not the first of Dodgson's child friends. They had been preceded or were overlapped by the children of the writer George Macdonald, the sons of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and various other chance acquaintances. But the Liddell children undoubtedly held an especially high place in his affections—partly because they were the only children in Christ Church, since only heads of houses were free both to marry and to continue in residence.

On July 4, 1862, Dodgson and his friend Robinson Duckworth, fellow of Trinity, rowed the three children up the Thames from Oxford to Godstow, picnicked on the
bank, and returned to Christ Church late in the evening: “On which occasion,” wrote Dodgson in his diary, “I told them the fairy-tale of
Alice's Adventures Underground
, which I undertook to write out for Alice.” Much of the story was based on a picnic a couple of weeks earlier when they had all been caught in the rain; for some reason, this inspired Dodgson to tell so much better a story than usual that both Duckworth and Alice noticed the difference, and Alice went so far as to cry, when they parted at the door of the deanery, “Oh, Mr. Dodgson, I wish you would write out Alice's adventures for me!”

Dodgson was able to write down the story more or less as told and added to it several extra adventures that had been told on other occasions. He illustrated it with his own crude but distinctive drawings and gave the finished product to Alice Liddell, with no thought of hearing of it again. But the novelist Henry Kingsley, while visiting the deanery, chanced to pick it up from the drawing-room table, read it, and urged Mrs. Liddell to persuade the author to publish it. Dodgson, honestly surprised, consulted his friend George Macdonald, author of some of the best children's stories of the period. Macdonald took it home to be read to his children, and his son Greville, aged six, declared that he “wished there were 60,000 volumes of it.”

Accordingly, Dodgson revised it for publication. At Duckworth's suggestion he got an introduction to John Tenniel, the
Punch
magazine cartoonist, whom he commissioned to make illustrations to his specification. The book was published as
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
in 1865. The book was a slow but steadily increasing success, and by the following year Dodgson was already considering a sequel to it. The result was
Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There
(dated 1872; actually published December 1871). By the time of Dodgson's death,
Alice
(taking the two volumes as a single artistic triumph) had become the most popular children's book in England: by the time of his centenary in 1932 it was one of the most popular and perhaps the most famous in the world.

Before he had told the original tale of
Alice's Adventures
, Dodgson had published a number of humorous items in verse and prose and a few inferior serious poems. The earliest of these appeared anonymously, but in March 1856 a poem called
Solitude
was published under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. Dodgson arrived at this pen name by taking his own names Charles Lutwidge, translating them into Latin as Carolus Ludovicus, then reversing and retranslating them into English. He used the name afterward for all his nonacademic works. His humorous and other verses were collected in 1869 as
Phantasmagoria and Other Poems
and later separated (with additions) as
Rhyme? and Reason?
(1883) and
Three Sunsets and Other Poems
(published posthumously, 1898). The 1883 volume also contained
The Hunting of the Snark
, a narrative nonsense poem that is rivalled only by the best of Edward Lear.

(b. Nov. 30, 1835, Florida, Mo., U.S.—d. April 21, 1910, Redding, Conn.)

M
ark Twain (the pseudonym of Samuel Clemens) was an American humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who acquired international fame for his travel narratives, especially
The Innocents Abroad
(1869),
Roughing It
(1872), and
Life on the Mississippi
(1883), and for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(1876) and
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1885). A gifted raconteur, distinctive humorist, and irascible moralist, he transcended the apparent limitations of his origins to become a popular public figure and one of America's best and most beloved writers.

Samuel Clemens, the sixth child of John Marshall and Jane Moffit Clemens, was born two months prematurely and was in relatively poor health for the first 10 years of his life. It was the diminishing fortunes of the Clemens family that led them in 1839 to move 30 miles (50 km) east from Florida, Mo., to the Mississippi River port town of Hannibal, where there were greater opportunities. John Clemens opened a store and eventually became a justice of the peace, which entitled him to be called “Judge” but not to a great deal more.

In 1848 Clemens became a printer's apprentice for Joseph P. Ament's
Missouri Courier
. He lived sparingly in the Ament household but was allowed to continue his schooling and, from time to time, indulge in boyish amusements. Nevertheless, by the time Clemens was 13, his boyhood had effectively come to an end. He became more than competent as a typesetter while working for his brother, who owned a newspaper, but he also occasionally contributed sketches and articles. Some of those early sketches, such as
The Dandy Frightening the Squatter
(1852), appeared in Eastern newspapers and periodicals.

Having acquired a trade by age 17, Clemens left Hannibal in 1853 with some degree of self-sufficiency. For almost two decades he would be an itinerant labourer, trying many occupations. It was not until he was 37, he once remarked, that he woke up to discover he had become a “literary person.” In the meantime, he was intent on seeing the world and exploring his own possibilities. He worked briefly as a typesetter in St. Louis in 1853 before working in New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. He continued to write, though without firm literary ambitions.

Still restless and ambitious, he booked passage in 1857 on a steamboat bound for New Orleans, La., planning to find his fortune in South America. Instead, he saw a more immediate opportunity and persuaded the accomplished riverboat captain Horace Bixby to take him on as an apprentice. Clemens studied the Mississippi River and the operation of a riverboat under the masterful instruction of Bixby, with an eye toward obtaining a pilot's license, which he did in 1859. The profession of riverboat pilot was, as he confessed many years later in
Old Times on the Mississippi
, the most congenial one he had ever followed. He continued to write occasional pieces throughout these years and, in one satirical sketch,
River Intelligence
(1859), lampooned the self-important senior pilot Isaiah Sellers, whose observations of the Mississippi were published in a New Orleans newspaper. Clemens and the other “starchy boys,” as he once described his fellow riverboat pilots in a letter to his wife, had no particular use for this nonunion man, but Clemens did envy what he later recalled to be Sellers's delicious pen name, Mark Twain.

The Civil War severely curtailed river traffic, and, fearing that he might be pressed into service as a Union gunboat pilot, Clemens brought his years on the river to a halt in 1861. After a sojourn in Hannibal, Clemens accompanied his brother Orion to the Nevada Territory, where Sam had to shift for himself. He submitted several letters to the Virginia City
Territorial Enterprise
, and these attracted the attention of the editor, Joseph Goodman, who offered him a salaried job as a reporter. He again embarked on an apprenticeship, in the hearty company of a group of writers sometimes called the Sagebrush Bohemians, and again he succeeded.

In February 1863 Clemens covered the legislative session in Carson City and wrote three letters for the
Enterprise
. He signed them “Mark Twain.” Apparently the mistranscription of a telegram misled Clemens to believe that the pilot Isaiah Sellers had died and that his cognomen was up for grabs. Clemens seized it. It would be several years before this pen name would acquire the firmness of a full-fledged literary persona, however. In the meantime, he was discovering by degrees what it meant to be a “literary person.” Some of his articles and sketches had appeared in New York papers, and he became the Nevada correspondent for the San Francisco
Morning Call
. A period as a reporter in San Francisco followed.