Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, led one ofthe most exciting and adventuresome of literary lives. Raised inthe river town of Hannibal, Missouri, Twain had to leave school atage twelve to seek work. He was successfully a journeyman printer,a steamboat pilot, a halfhearted Confederate soldier (for a fewweeks), and a prospector, miner, a reporter in the westernterritories. With the publication in 1865 of “The CelebratedJumping Frog of Calaveras County,” Twain gained national attentionas a frontier humorist, and with The Adventures of HuckleberryFinn (1855), he was acknowledged by the literary establishmentas one of the greatest writers America would ever produce.
In 1880 Twain began promoting and financing heavily the ill-fatedPaige typesetter, an invention designed to make the printingprocess fully automatic. This enterprise drained his energy andfunds for almost fifteen years, until it drove him to the brink ofbankruptcy. Ironically at the height of his naively optimisticinvolvement in his technological “wonder,” he published hissatirical A Connecticut Yankee in King’s Arthur’s Court(1889), as though the writer in him could see the dangers theinvestor in him was blind to.
Toward the end of his life, plagued by personal tragedy andfinancial failure, Mark Twain grew more and more pessimistic–anoutlook not alleviated by his natural skepticism and sarcasm.Though his fame continued to widen. Twain spent his last years ingloom and exasperation, writing fables about “the damned humanrace.”