Mark Twain Riverboat pilot, journalist, failed businessman(several times over): Samuel Clemens -- the man behind the figureof “Mark Twain” -- led many lives. But it was in his novels andshort stories that he created a voice and an outlook on life thatwill be forever identified with the American character. BiographyMark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835,in Florida, Missouri; his family moved to the port town of Hannibalfour years later. His father, an unsuccessful farmer, died whenTwain was eleven. Soon afterward the boy began working as anapprentice printer, and by age sixteen he was writing newspapersketches. He left Hannibal at eighteen to work as an itinerantprinter in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. From1857 to 1861 he worked on Mississippi steamboats, advancing fromcub pilot to licensed pilot. After river shipping was interruptedby the Civil War, Twain headed west with his brother Orion, who hadbeen appointed secretary to the Nevada Territory. Settling inCarson City, he tried his luck at prospecting and wrote humorouspieces for a range of newspapers. Around this time he first beganusing the pseudonym Mark Twain, derived from a riverboat term.Relocating to San Francisco, he became a regular newspapercorrespondent and a contributor to the literary magazine the GoldenEra. He made a five-month journey to Hawaii in 1866 and thefollowing year traveled to Europe to report on the first organizedtourist cruise. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County andOther Sketches (1867) consolidated his growing reputation ashumorist and lecturer. After his marriage to Livy Langdon, Twainsettled first in Buffalo, New York, and then for two decades inHartford, Connecticut. His European sketches were expanded into TheInnocents Abroad (1869), followed by Roughing It (1872), an accountof his Western adventures; both were enormously successful. Twain'sliterary triumphs were offset by often ill-advised businessdealings (he sank thousands of dollars, for instance, in a failedattempt to develop a new kind of typesetting machine, and thousandsmore into his own ultimately unsuccessful publishing house) andunrestrained spending that left him in frequent financialdifficulty, a pattern that was to persist throughout his life.Following The Gilded Age (1873), written in collaboration withCharles Dudley Warner, Twain began a literary exploration of hischildhood memories of the Mississippi, resulting in a trio ofmasterpieces --The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on theMississippi (1883), and finally The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(1885), on which he had been working for nearly a decade. Anothervein, of historical romance, found expression in The Prince and thePauper (1882), the satirical A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur'sCourt (1889), and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896),while he continued to draw on his travel experiences in A TrampAbroad (1880) and Following the Equator (1897). His closeassociates in these years included William Dean Howells, BretHarte, and George Washington Cable, as well as the dying Ulysses S.Grant, whom Twain encouraged to complete his memoirs, published byTwain's publishing company in 1885. For most of the 1890s Twainlived in Europe, as his life took a darker turn with the death ofhis daughter Susy in 1896 and the worsening illness of his daughterJean. The tone of Twain's writing also turned progressively morebitter. The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), a detective storyhinging on the consequences of slavery, was followed by powerfulanti-imperialist and anticolonial statements such as 'To the PersonSitting in Darkness' (1901), 'The War Prayer' (1905), and 'KingLeopold's Soliloquy' (1905), and by the pessimistic sketchescollected in the privately published What Is Man? (1906). Theunfinished novel The Mysterious Stranger was perhaps the mostuncompromisingly dark of all Twain's later works. In his lastyears, his financial troubles finally resolved, Twain settled nearRedding, Connecticut, and died in his
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