Mark Twain: 1835-1910

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, but is known by the pen name Mark Twain. When Twain was four, his family moved to Hannibal, a port town on the Mississippi River, that would serve as the inspiration for the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

In 1847 he became a printer's apprentice and then began working as a typesetter and contributor of articles and humorous sketches for the Hannibal Journal. When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati.

At 22, Twain returned to Missouri. On a voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi, the steamboat pilot, Bixby, inspired Twain to begin a career as a steamboat pilot. A steamboat pilot needed a vast knowledge of the ever-changing river to be able to stop at any of the hundreds of ports along the river banks. Twain maintained that his pen name came from his years working on Mississippi riverboats, where two fathoms, a depth indicating "safe water" for the boat to float over, was measured on the sounding line. The riverboatman's cry was "mark twain", twain" being an archaic term for "two."

In February 1870 he got married and the couple lived in Buffalo, New York. A year later they moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where starting in 1873 Twain arranged the building of a dramatic house for them.

Mark TwainÕs first important work, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, was first published in 1865. Twain's major publications were The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which drew on his youth in Hannibal and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain made a great amount of money through his writing, but he spent much of it in bad investments, but he also lost money through his publishing house, He was able to pay back his debts with money he made on lecturing tours in America and England.

Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut