Advice to Youth by Mark Twain Summary

Advice to Youth by American writer and humorist Mark Twain is a speech written in 1882 that, employing the literary device of satire, exposes the fallacies of elders giving advice to the young generation despite being flawed themselves. Twain hints at the ills of blindly heeding advice; he urges people to develop their own minds and think critically. Throughout the essay, he employs wit and humor to expose the older generation’s hypocrisy and the authority figures’ dishonesty in conducting themselves.

The speech begins with Mark Twain saying that he has been asked to give a talk to the younger generation that should be “didactic”, or a lesson in “good advice”. In the first paragraph, he tells his audience to listen to their parents only when they are present because if they don’t, their parents will make them anyway. One needn’t act on their own judgment when parents think they know better than their children.

He then tells the young generation to be respectful to their superiors, if they have any. If anyone offends them, then they should calmly take a step back and hit them when they get a chance instead of taking any extreme measures. If the offense was not intended, confess that the striking was not intended either.

Going to bed early and rising early is wise. Rising with a lark is the best, should one train the lark to wake up at half past nine. About lying, Twain says that one must be very careful or they will get caught. If the lie is single and unfinished, the liar will definitely be caught. Lying is a great art, and one must have patience, diligence, and attention to detail to craft the perfect lie. He ridicules the maxim “Truth is mighty and will prevail” and says that the truth is, in fact, not hard to repudiate, but a good lie is immortal. He gives the example of the man who “discovered anesthesia” and the lie that has since prevailed. Saying the truth is better than telling a feeble lie, and one must learn the art of lying early in life.

The next paragraph is about handling ammunition. He narrates an incident: four days ago, a grandmother, at the next farmhouse from where he is staying, sat down to her work, and her grandson picked up an old gun and pointed it at her. She ran and screamed, and he pulled the trigger at her breast, thinking that the gun was not loaded, which it indeed wasn’t. Twain asks his audience not to meddle with unloaded firearms, as they’re the most deadly weapons created by man. He asks them to think about a situation where, at the battle of Waterloo, one army was composed of boys with unloaded muskets while the other army was composed of their “female relations.” He says this thought makes “one shudder”. 

Speaking of books, Twain says that good books are for the young to read. One must confine themselves to reading “Robertson’s Sermons, Baxter’s Saint’s Rest, The Innocents Abroad,” etc.

He ends his speech by hoping that his audience will treasure the instructions given by him and employ them in their daily lives to build their characters thoughtfully and mindfully. When they do so, they will realize their character sharply resembles everyone else’s.

It is not clear if Twain actually wrote the speech to address an audience or if it remained a piece of writing. His audience was probably young Americans. Advice to Youth, written in 1882, is widely regarded as a Juvenalian satire that employs scorn or savage ridicule to expose perceived social evils. The speech is specifically directed at young people. The tone is mock-serious; he claims at the beginning of the speech that he has been asked to say something didactic, that is, intended to educate or preach, but he goes on to mock the older generation. The speech can be read as a critique of authority; in the common fashion in which graduation speeches were given, Twain primarily advises the audience on six topics, possibly to portray the insistence of elders to listen to certain advice while being far from perfect themselves.

By asking the young generation to only listen to elders when they are present, the author points out that elders cannot accept the fact that they could possibly be wrong about anything, and the young must follow them in all regards. He playfully tells the audience that extreme or immediate violence does no good, and in fact, one must strike when they get the chance. He talks about lying as an art and unloaded firearms being the greatest enemies of mankind. He constantly uses caricature images like a grandson pointing an unloaded gun and a grandmother screaming for the humor to stay intact throughout the speech. Even the books he asks the young to read are didactic and biblical, which is contrary to what children should read to cultivate a healthy habit of reading.

He asks young people to live up to the illusion of obeying their parents because, in his view, it makes everything simpler for everyone. This is because they “think they know better than you“, implying that parents do not necessarily know better every time, but they refuse to listen to reason. Twain is a humorist, and his writing style is such that it keeps a reader or listener entertained. Twain’s speech is not meant to be taken seriously; rather, it challenges the existing notions of wisdom and moral behavior at the time. Twain urges the young generation to be cautious of the advice they constantly receive because people are not perfect themselves.

The ending of the speech is particularly important; he claims that once the young people have taken all his advice and done exactly as he has advised them to, they will see : 

“how nicely and sharply it (their character) resembles everybody else’s”.

 Twain covertly says that while the elders indulge in being didactic and dole out advice to the young generation, asking them to follow their words as the gospel, in reality, they have mastered the art of lying, as Twain advises in his speech, and are flawed and vain as people. The authorities that he attacks are more often than not unreasonable and try to make the young follow in their footsteps by keeping up a pretense of perfection.

Twain ultimately mocks the idea of receiving constant advice from the elders and treating it as true just because it comes from people who are older than them; instead, one must make up their own minds about things because authority figures are seldom perfect. In this sense, the speech is a call to young people to think critically and act rationally.

Called by William Faulkner the Father of American Literature’, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was a humorist, lecturer, and writer. He is perhaps best known for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was born in Hannibal, Missouri, which provides the setting for his aforementioned works. He adopted the pen name Mark Twain while he was working as a journalist. His satire and wit, which characterize his writings, connote a keen observation of American life in the nineteenth century. Interestingly, he was born shortly after Halley’s Comet and predicted that he would die with its next sighting; he died a month before Halley’s Comet was seen again.

Twain’s speech, Advice to Youth, is not only humorous in its language and rhetoric but is also a covert call to young people to not listen to anyone being ‘didactic’ but rather act out of their own rationality and develop their own minds. The irony here is that he himself has been ‘asked to’ talk about something didactic. Twain is a humorist; his works reflect an astute observation and understanding of society’s workings. It implies a denial of authority and taking any wisdom with a pinch of salt.