Popular Misconceptions

One of the tidbits of information on a ‘list of facts’ that I was e-mailed at working is the following claim:

The first novel ever written on a typewriter: Tom Sawyer

A few minutes of Googling reveals dozens of web-pages on which this claim is repeated, but dozens more on which it is refuted, and it doesn’t take long to get to what looks like the most likely truth.

Tom Sawyer, or rather The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, to give it its full name, was written in 1876 by Mark Twain (pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Having worked as a typesetter, he was apparently a keen collector of new inventions, and thus one of the first to purchase a rudimentary typewriter.

Unusually enough, for a popular misconception, this claim seems to have arisen from the source itself, with Mark Twain having said:

I have claimed that I was the first person in the world that ever had a telephone in his house for practical purposes. I will now claim - until dispossessed - that I was the first person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature. That book must have been The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I wrote the first half of it in ‘72, the rest of it in ‘74. My machinist type-copied a book for me in ‘74, so I concluded it was that one.

That machine was full of caprices, full of defects - devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of to-day has virtues.

(Source: [Mark Twain] and the Typewriter).

All of which would seem to be a fairly straightforward claim, although is as quoted in a newspaper advert for a typewriter.

However, it seems that academic opinion is that Mark Twain remembered it wrong. He was the author of the first novel written on a typewriter, it seems, but with Life on the Mississippi instead. (This counter-claim is widely credited to historian Darryl Rehr, who cites ‘careful research by Twain historians’)

Another blogger, David Peterson, summarised the same conclusion
, and also put together this neat timeline:

• 1874 - Clemens purchases his first typewriter for $125. His first two letters are written on December 9th, 1894.
• 1875 - Clemens writes to Remington declaring he is no longer using his typewriter as people keep asking him about it. In another letter he declares it is corrupting his morals because it makes him want to swear. He gives it away twice that year and it is eventually returned both times.
• 1876 - ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ is published.
• 1883 - ‘Life on the Mississippi’ is submitted as a typewritten manuscript. Clemens did not actually type it himself, however. He dictated it based on a hand-written original draft.
• 1904 - Clemens writes in his ‘Unpublished Autobiography’ that he believes ‘Tom Sawyer’ was probably his first typewritten novel, dictated to a typist sometime during 1874.[1]

So there we have it.

Amusingly, when this question was posed at Yahoo! Answers, ‘Tom Sawyer’ was chosen as ‘best answer’, rather than the correct one, which just goes to show the power of a popularly repeated misconception. More amusingly still is this rather pedantic answer by seeinred06:

There was never a novel written on a typewriter. You don’t write on a typewriter, you type on one.