About Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, in the tiny village of Florida, Missouri, the sixth of seven children. When he was four, his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a small town on the Mississippi River that would become the model for St. Petersburg in both The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Hannibal was a slaveholding community, and Clemens grew up surrounded by the institution that would become the central subject of his greatest novel. Clemens's formal education ended at age twelve when his father died and he was apprenticed to a local printer. He worked as a typesetter and occasional writer for newspapers in several cities before fulfilling his childhood dream of becoming a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River in 1859. His pilot's license gave him intimate knowledge of the river that would infuse his greatest fiction. The pen name "Mark Twain" derives from a riverboat term meaning two fathoms deep—the minimum depth for safe navigation. The Civil War ended river traffic and Clemens's piloting career. After a brief, inglorious stint in a Confederate militia unit, he headed west to Nevada and California, where he began his literary career as a journalist and humorist. His 1865 short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" brought him national fame. He married Olivia Langdon in 1870, and the couple settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where Twain wrote his major works, including Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Huckleberry Finn (1884-85). Twain's later life was marked by financial difficulties—he lost a fortune on a failed typesetting machine investment—and personal tragedy. His daughter Susy died of meningitis in 1896, his wife Olivia died in 1904, and his daughter Jean died of an epileptic seizure on Christmas Eve 1909. These losses darkened Twain's outlook considerably, and his later writings became increasingly bitter and pessimistic. He died on April 21, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut, at the age of seventy-four. As he had predicted, he arrived with Halley's Comet and departed with it, the comet making its closest approach to Earth the day after his death.