Personal tragedy haunted his entire life, in the deaths of loved ones: his father, dying of pneumonia when Sam was 12; his brother Henry, killed by a steamboat explosion; the death of his son, Langdon, at 19 months. His eldest daughter, Susy, died of spinal meningitis , Mrs. Clemens succumbed to a heart attack in Florence, and youngest daughter., Jean, an epileptic, drowned in an upstairs bathtub . 马克?吐温的一生都笼罩在悲剧的阴影之中， 自 己的亲人一个接一个地去世：他的父亲在他十二岁那年死于肺炎，他的兄弟亨利在一次汽船爆炸事故中遇 难；他的儿子朗顿才满十九个月即离开人世。他的大女儿苏茜死于脊膜炎；克莱门斯夫人在佛罗伦萨死于 心脏病；而他的小女儿也因癫痫病的发作淹死在楼上的浴盆里。
Bitterness fed on the man who had made the world laugh. The moralizing of his earlier writing had been well padded with humor. Now the gloves came off with biting satire. He pretended to praise the U. S. military for the massacre of 600 Philippine Moros in the bowl of a volcanic, crater . In The Mysterious Stranger, he insisted that man drop his religious illusions and depend upon himself, not
Providence, to make a better world. 这位曾令全世 界欢笑的人自己却饱尝了人世的辛酸。他早期作品中的道德说教厚厚地包着一层幽默的外衣，现在幽默换 成了辛辣的讽刺。对于美国军队在一个火山口上屠杀六百名菲律宾摩洛人的行为，他没有直接进行抨击， 而是假装为之高唱赞歌。在《神秘的陌生人》中，他指出人类应该抛弃宗教幻想，依靠自己而不是上帝的 力量去创造一个更加美好的世界。
The last of his own illusions seemed to have crumbled near the end. Dictating his autobiography late in life, he commented with a crushing sense of despair on men's final release from earthly struggles: \ they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence; where they achieved nothing; where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness; where they have left no sign that they had existed – a world which will lament them a day and for-get them forever.‖ 他自己的最后一个幻想到后来似乎也破灭了。在晚年口述自传的时候，他以极端绝望 的心情谈到人从尘世的苦难中的最终解脱：―……他们从世界上消失了，在这个世界上他们无足轻重，无所 成就；甚至他们的存在本身就是个错误，是个失败，是种愚蠢。这个世界上也没有留下丝毫能表明他们存 在过的痕迹。这个世界赠给他们的只是一日的哀伤和永久的遗忘