mark twain short biography pdf

• Huskie Link
• Anywhere Apps
• Huskies Get Hired
• Student Email
• Password Self-Service

Advanced Search

• Quick Links
• Photographs
• Illustrations & Pictures
• Songs & Sheet Music
• Manuscripts
• Articles & Clippings
• Video Recordings
• Nickels and Dimes: Dime Novels From the Collections of Johannsen and LeBlanc
• Lee Schreiner Sheet Music Collection
• 1962 World Science Fiction Collection
• 125th Anniversary Oral History Project
• Norther Yearbooks
• Northern Illinois
• Golden Anniversary Project
• NIU-DeKalb Community Black Oral History Project
• Peace Corps Training for Thailand
• W. W. Embree Collection
• World War I & II Poster Collection
• Browse all collections
• Southeast Asia Digital Library
• Latinx Oral History Project
• Ritzman Photo Collection
• Mark Twain's Mississippi
• Lincoln/Net
• Illinois During the Gilded Age
• American Archives
• Illinois During the Civil War
• Projects & Grants
• Get Involved
• Digitization Request
• Copyright & Usage
• Digitization Guidelines
• Collection Development Policy
• Digital Preservation Policy
• Digital Preservation Implementation Plan

Mark Twain's Mississippi

• Primary Source Materials

Mark Twain's Biography

by Gregg Camfield, PhD, University of California-Merced

On November 30, 1835, nearly thirty years before he took the pen name Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, a hamlet some 130 miles north-northwest of St. Louis, and 30 miles inland from the Mississippi River. His father, John Marshall Clemens, had earlier that year moved the family there from Tennessee. In Tennessee, he had accumulated much land, a pair of slaves, a wife, and five children, but his efforts as a lawyer, storekeeper, and local politician did not yield the wealth he desired. Like many of his contemporaries, he decided that the way to a fortunate future was to move west. His brother-in-law, John Quarles, had established a farm in the new hamlet of Florida and invited John Marshall Clemens, his wife, Jane Lampton Clemens, and their brood of children to the new country.

Trained to be a country lawyer, John Marshall was no farmer, and even though Americans were extraordinarily litigious, it would take time (and denser population) to build a law practice that could support a family. He fell back on keeping store, and again did not thrive. Given that the river was where a merchant had access to markets, John Marshall moved his family to the as-yet-unincorporated town of Hannibal, about 30 miles east-northeast of Florida. There, too, his business ventures, in his dry-goods store, in his land dealings, even in his efforts to trade slaves, did not prosper. The family found itself slipping toward poverty — so desperate, in fact, that they had to sell off their furniture — before finally, John Marshall's political ambitions ended in his election to justice of the peace. While the fees he earned in this office were not enough to make the family's fortunes, they were the difference between poverty and a competence. Yet with fortunes finally looking up, John Marshall Clemens took ill and died in 1847. The remaining Clemens family (mother Jane, sister Pamela, and brothers Orion, Samuel, and Henry) had to make their way by hook and crook. Orion was already off in St. Louis, working as a journeyman printer. The wages he sent home kept the family afloat. Within a year, however, young Samuel could no longer afford the luxuries of childhood, school and play. Instead, he began his first apprenticeship, to Hannibal printer William Ament, publisher of the grandly named Missouri Courier.

In working for Ament, Sam learned about printing, the first mass production industry, almost as it had been practiced from the beginning. In a country print shop, a printer had to do everything from the editorial side, to type setting, to press-work, to distributing the finished product. There was no division of labor, and only hints of the industrial revolution. Yet brother Orion in St. Louis was working in a major print shop, as a compositor rather than as a printer. Orion, in keeping with craft guild principles, wanted to be his own master, so in 1851, he returned to Hannibal, bought one of the other Hannibal newspapers, the equally grandly named Western Union, and took on his younger brothers Samuel and Henry as his apprentices. He soon combined his struggling newspaper with the Hannibal Journal, but even a merger could not turn a local paper into a good living, especially for an owner whose politics were not fully congenial to Hannibal.

Neither younger brother much appreciated working for their quirky older brother. Orion fancied himself to be a new Benjamin Franklin, and used to badger his younger brothers with Franklin's aphorisms about industry, efficiency, temperance, and frugality. The frugality was imposed by the fact that such old-fashioned printing was not lucrative, even when it was a central part of the social fabric of the American small town. Young Samuel accepted the push toward industry and temperance, even as younger brother Henry rebelled by being lazy and sloppy in his work. Orion's response to Henry's poor work was often to put more on Samuel. Naturally, Sam came to resent his position, too. In 1853, he bolted, heading first for St. Louis to work as a typesetter, then heading out of the Mississippi Valley for the first time to work as a typesetter in a number of eastern cities, including New York and Philadelphia.

His correspondence home shows how much he accepted his responsibility to his mother, promising her a portion of his wages, yet his contact with the new industrial economy of the big cities prevented him from making much financial progress in his work. Demoralized that he was unable to make his fortune, he rejoined his family, which, in the interim, had also abandoned Hannibal. His sister had already moved to St. Louis when in 1851 she married William A. Moffet, a successful merchant. His brother Orion had sold his Hannibal print shop to move to Muscatine, Iowa, to free soil, where his abolitionist ideas were neither a threat to his livelihood nor his health. Samuel at this point did not oppose slavery; his attitudes were shaped primarily by those held by his Missouri neighbors, especially by his father and his Uncle Quarles. While his father never had many slaves, and in financial exigency had been forced to sell, he had helped uphold slavery in Missouri. His uncle was a farmer whose success depended not only on his own work, but on the labor of his slaves. In the years before he began his apprenticeship, Sam had spent many summers on the Quarles farm. But Orion's time in St. Louis had put him in touch with organized labor which, though often quite racist in its outlook, was opposed to slave labor as a system that undercut wages. When he moved to Iowa at the very end of 1853, he became active in anti-slavery politics, leading him ultimately to working for Lincoln's election in 1860.

Sam's return to the Mississippi Valley in late spring of 1854 was not a return to his childhood home. Now living in a free state, but with strong family ties to Missouri, his return to work for his brother was a stop-gap. Indeed, late in that year and early in 1855, he worked in St. Louis before returning to Muscatine. In 1856, he left home again, this time for a stint of typesetting in Cincinnati. Itinerant as always, Clemens was but briefly satisfied in Cincinnati, and when on his way home in 1857, he decided, instead, to change careers to become a riverboat pilot. In order to do so, he had to pay $500, half up front, with the balance to be paid from his first wages when the apprenticeship was over. (Multiply these numbers by 25 to find a rough equivalent to today's dollars.) He had to borrow the down payment from his brother-in-law. Young Sam did not have good role models for how to spend money, but given how poor he was, the amount he was willing to borrow says something about how much he wanted to become a riverboat pilot.

Fictionalized slightly, “Old Times on the Mississippi” tells the story of this apprenticeship. With the addition of the story of his successful efforts to get his younger brother, Henry, a job on a steamboat and his younger brother's death in a steamboat accident, found in chapters 18-20 of Life on the Mississippi, Twain's own account of his days as an apprentice on a steamboat, and his account of the social and political circumstances of steam boating, is one of the best accounts of river life ever written. But he left off the tale at the end of his apprenticeship, telling us next to nothing about his brief, successful career in boating. When fully licensed as a pilot in the St. Louis to New Orleans trade, Sam Clemens found regular and lucrative employment, enabling him not only to pay off his debts and help support his mother, but also giving him enough extra income to indulge himself.

I can "bank" in the neighborhood of $100 a month . . . and that will satisfy me for the present . . . . Bless me! . . . what respect Prosperity commands. Why, six months ago, I could enter the "Rooms," [of the Western Boatmen's Benevolent Association] and receive only the customary fraternal greeting — but now they say, "Why how are you, old fellow — when did you get in?" And the young pilots who used to tell me, patronisingly, that I could never learn the river, cannot keep from showing a little of their chagrin at seeing me so far ahead of them. . . . I must confess that when I go to pay my dues, I rather like to let the d—d rascals get a glimpse of a hundred dollar bill peeping out from amongst notes of smaller dimensions.

Not surprisingly, one of his chief indulgences was to speculate in commodities, buying and shipping them as he went up and down the river. True to family form, he lost money.

But his newfound wealth and the company he began to keep helped him leave his mother's and brother's world emotionally as well as physically. He was a chief player in an industry that was so modern and cosmopolitan that it figures in such stories as T.B. Thorpe's “The Big Bear of Arkansas” and Herman Melville's The Confidence Man, as a symbol of America: of its politics, its trade, its industry, its cultural and ethnic diversity, of its inexorable changes. His letters from the period show him indulging his restless spirit in taking advantage of the entertainments of two of America's great cities. From things as innocent as learning to dance, which according to his mother's strict religion encouraged sin, to learning to drink and curse, which were culturally normal but coming under regular attack in an evangelical and reformist age, Clemens explored behavior and attitudes that were new to him. And the powers of observation required of him as a pilot certainly helped him when he turned to journalism and then to writing novels, sketches, and stories.

Had the Civil War not interrupted the river trade, Samuel Clemens might have spent his life as a pilot, writing no more than an occasional newspaper squib. Clemens was not a hothead on either side, in part because his livelihood depended on commerce between the North and the South up and down the great riverway. In the election of 1860, Sam Clemens voted his bread and butter. Spurning both the Democratic Party and the new Republican Party, Clemens voted for the Constitutional Union Party's ticket of Bell and Everett. But when the war began, Clemens's vague leanings toward states' rights and slavery came out. First, he holed up with his sister's family in St. Louis, fearing that he would be impressed as a pilot for Union transport or gun boats. Then, in the late spring of 1861, he answered the call of the states' rights leaning Missouri Governor, C.F. Jackson, to form militias to “repel the invader.” Technically, Missouri never joined the Confederacy, so Clemens's brief stint as an irregular soldier cannot be classified as time as a Confederate soldier, but given that Clemens and his fellow militia-men knew full well that they were to fight against the troops of the United States Army, such semantic distinctions are unimportant. What is important, is that Clemens was not confident enough of his actions to let his brother Orion know of them.

The Civil War radically transformed the nation and many of the lives in it, and that was almost as true for Sam Clemens as it was for so many others. Sam Clemens planned to pass the few months the War was expected to last out West, living off his savings while prospecting for silver and gold. As the War dragged on, his savings ran out. He did not strike it rich, and facing poverty again, he returned to the printing industry, this time on the editorial side. In part because he was a talented writer and in part because he was well connected politically, he was hired by the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise to be a reporter. There he served yet another apprenticeship, this time in literary work. There he first used his famous pen name, “Mark Twain,” derived from his days on the River. The call “Mark Twain” means, literally, “at this point, two,” meaning that at a given point, the river is two fathoms (twelve feet) deep. This was the usual depth for safe passage for a Mississippi River steamboat. (Though in Virginia City, some of his friends interpreted “Mark Twain” to stand for Clemens's tendency to order two drinks at a time and mark them on his bar tab.) There he began to work as a roving reporter, and the reputation he earned in Nevada expanded until newspapers from California to New York sent him all over the world to report on politics, the arts, fashion, commerce — anything that would entertain or inform readers. His life as a reporter and then as a belletristic writer led him to make his home in Nevada, California, Washington, D.C., New York, Connecticut, England, Germany, France, and Italy, but never again in the Mississippi Valley.

While the War started a chain of events that removed Samuel Clemens physically from the Mississippi Valley, it did not remove him imaginatively. If anything, the War also forced Clemens to rethink what he believed. As he put it in a letter to his Missouri friend Jacob H. Burrough in a 1 November 1876 letter,

As you describe me I can picture myself as I was, twenty-two years of age. The portrait is correct. You think I have grown some; upon my word there was room for it. You have described a callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug . . . . Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle-headedness . . . . That is what I was at 19-20; & that is what the average Southerner is at 60 to-day.

The process that began in 1860 did not end until he died in 1910, and in his imagination he revisited the Mississippi Valley incessantly, in one literary work after another, including The Gilded Age (1871) “Old Times on the Mississippi” (1874), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (1893), a series of sequels to the Tom and Huck stories, and in “Chapters from My Autobiography.”

Jump to navigation

Resources and Programs

• Teaching the Four Skills
• U.S. Culture, Music & Games
• Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
• Other Resources
• English Club Texts and Materials
• Teacher's Corner
• Comics for Language Learning
• Online Professional English Network (OPEN)

The Autobiography of Mark Twain is an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners. Twain, who lived in the United States in the nineteenth century, is the author of such classics as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer . In this volume Twain recounts colorful anecdotes from his long life.

Format(s): Book Pages: 100 Size: 6 x 9 in. GPS Invoice No: G0033-E

How to order: Outside the United States, print copies of the publications in this catalog may be requested by contacting the Public Affairs or Cultural Section of the nearest U.S. Embassy. We cannot guarantee, however, that all publications will be available at every office.

The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs is prohibited from distributing its print materials in the United States by the Smith-Mundt Act.

Listen Online: The Autobiography of Mark Twain

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain, an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 2 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain, an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 3 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain, an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 4 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 5 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 6 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 7 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 8 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 9 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 10 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 11 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 12 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 13 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 14 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 15 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 16 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 17 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 18 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 19 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 20 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 21 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 22 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 23 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 24 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 25 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 26 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 27 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 28 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 29 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 30 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Chapter 32 of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

Glossary of The Autobiography of Mark Twain , an adaptation of Twain’s autobiography. Part of the Ladder series, this title has approximately three thousand headwords and is appropriate for upper intermediate to advanced learners.

• Privacy Notice
• Copyright Info
• Accessibility Statement
• Get Adobe Reader

For English Language Teachers Around the World

The Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, U.S. Department of State, manages this site. External links to other Internet sites should not be construed as an endorsement of the views or privacy policies contained therein.

• Project Gutenberg
• 74,082 free eBooks
• 255 by Mark Twain

The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain by Mark Twain

Read now or download (free!)

Similar Books

About this ebook.

• Privacy policy
• About Project Gutenberg
• Terms of Use
• Contact Information

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction & Top Questions
• Apprenticeships
• Literary maturity
• Reputation and legacy

When did Mark Twain start writing?

What are some of mark twain’s most famous works.

• Do adults read children's literature?
• When did American literature begin?
• Who are some important authors of American literature?

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• Humanities LibreTexts - Biography of Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
• Poetry Foundation - Mark Twain
• Northern Illinois University Digital Library - Biography of Mark Twain
• American National Biography - Mark Twain
• Historic Missourians - Mark Twain
• Mark Twain - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
• Mark Twain - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

Who was Mark Twain?

Mark Twain was an American humorist, novelist, and travel writer. Today he is best remembered as the author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Twain is widely considered one of the greatest American writers of all time.

What is Mark Twain’s real name?

Mark Twain is the pen name of Samuel Clemens. Although the exact origins of the name are unknown, it is worth noting that Clemens operated riverboats, and mark twain is a nautical term for water found to be two fathoms (12 feet [3.7 metres]) deep: mark (measure) twain (two).

Where did Mark Twain grow up?

Mark Twain was born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. In 1839 his family moved to the Mississippi port town of Hannibal in search of greater economic opportunities. In Old Times on the Mississippi (1875), he recalled his childhood in Hannibal with fondness.

In 1848 Mark Twain became a printer’s apprentice for the Missouri Courier . Three years later his elder brother, Orion, bought the Hannibal Journal , and Twain began working for him as a typesetter. Occasionally, he contributed sketches and articles to the Journal . Some of his early sketches, such as “The Dandy Frightening the Squatter” (1852), circulated in local newspapers.

During his lifetime Mark Twain wrote more than 20 novels. His most famous novels included The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which are loosely based on Twain’s boyhood experiences in Missouri. Twain also wrote numerous short stories, most notably “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865).

When did Mark Twain die?

Mark Twain died on April 21, 1910. The last piece of writing he did, evidently, was the short humorous sketch “Etiquette for the Afterlife: Advice to Paine.” The sketch was published posthumously in 1995.

Recent News

Mark Twain (born November 30, 1835, Florida, Missouri, U.S.—died April 21, 1910, Redding, Connecticut) was an American humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who acquired international fame for his travel narratives, especially The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and Life on the Mississippi (1883), and for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). A gifted raconteur, distinctive humorist, and irascible moralist, he transcended the apparent limitations of his origins to become a popular public figure and one of America’s best and most beloved writers.

Samuel Clemens, the sixth child of John Marshall and Jane Lampton Clemens, was born two months prematurely and was in relatively poor health for the first 10 years of his life. His mother tried various allopathic and hydropathic remedies on him during those early years, and his recollections of those instances (along with other memories of his growing up) would eventually find their way into Tom Sawyer and other writings. Because he was sickly, Clemens was often coddled, particularly by his mother, and he developed early the tendency to test her indulgence through mischief, offering only his good nature as bond for the domestic crimes he was apt to commit. When Jane Clemens was in her 80s, Clemens asked her about his poor health in those early years: “I suppose that during that whole time you were uneasy about me?” “Yes, the whole time,” she answered. “Afraid I wouldn’t live?” “No,” she said, “afraid you would.”

Insofar as Clemens could be said to have inherited his sense of humour, it would have come from his mother, not his father. John Clemens, by all reports, was a serious man who seldom demonstrated affection. No doubt his temperament was affected by his worries over his financial situation, made all the more distressing by a series of business failures. It was the diminishing fortunes of the Clemens family that led them in 1839 to move 30 miles (50 km) east from Florida , Missouri , to the Mississippi River port town of Hannibal , where there were greater opportunities. John Clemens opened a store and eventually became a justice of the peace , which entitled him to be called “Judge” but not to a great deal more. In the meantime, the debts accumulated. Still, John Clemens believed the Tennessee land he had purchased in the late 1820s (some 70,000 acres [28,000 hectares]) might one day make them wealthy, and this prospect cultivated in the children a dreamy hope. Late in his life, Twain reflected on this promise that became a curse:

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us—dreamers and indolent.…It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich—these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

Judging from his own speculative ventures in silver mining , business, and publishing, it was a curse that Sam Clemens never quite outgrew.

Perhaps it was the romantic visionary in him that caused Clemens to recall his youth in Hannibal with such fondness. As he remembered it in “ Old Times on the Mississippi” (1875), the village was a “white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning,” until the arrival of a riverboat suddenly made it a hive of activity. The gamblers, stevedores, and pilots, the boisterous raftsmen and elegant travelers, all bound for somewhere surely glamorous and exciting, would have impressed a young boy and stimulated his already active imagination. And the lives he might imagine for these living people could easily be embroidered by the romantic exploits he read in the works of James Fenimore Cooper , Sir Walter Scott , and others. Those same adventures could be reenacted with his companions as well, and Clemens and his friends did play at being pirates, Robin Hood , and other fabled adventurers. Among those companions was Tom Blankenship, an affable but impoverished boy whom Twain later identified as the model for the character Huckleberry Finn . There were local diversions as well—fishing, picnicking, and swimming. A boy might swim or canoe to and explore Glasscock’s Island, in the middle of the Mississippi River, or he might visit the labyrinthine McDowell’s Cave, about 2 miles (3 km) south of town. The first site evidently became Jackson’s Island in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ; the second became McDougal’s Cave in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer . In the summers, Clemens visited his uncle John Quarles’s farm, near Florida, Missouri, where he played with his cousins and listened to stories told by the slave Uncle Daniel, who served, in part, as a model for Jim in Huckleberry Finn .

It is not surprising that the pleasant events of youth, filtered through the softening lens of memory, might outweigh disturbing realities. However, in many ways the childhood of Samuel Clemens was a rough one. Death from disease during this time was common. His sister Margaret died of a fever when Clemens was not yet four years old; three years later his brother Benjamin died. When he was eight, a measles epidemic (potentially lethal in those days) was so frightening to him that he deliberately exposed himself to infection by climbing into bed with his friend Will Bowen in order to relieve the anxiety. A cholera epidemic a few years later killed at least 24 people, a substantial number for a small town. In 1847 Clemens’s father died of pneumonia. John Clemens’s death contributed further to the family’s financial instability. Even before that year, however, continuing debts had forced them to auction off property, to sell their only slave, Jennie, to take in boarders, even to sell their furniture.

Apart from family worries, the social environment was hardly idyllic . Missouri was a slave state, and, though the young Clemens had been reassured that chattel slavery was an institution approved by God, he nevertheless carried with him memories of cruelty and sadness that he would reflect upon in his maturity. Then there was the violence of Hannibal itself. One evening in 1844 Clemens discovered a corpse in his father’s office; it was the body of a California emigrant who had been stabbed in a quarrel and was placed there for the inquest. In January 1845 Clemens watched a man die in the street after he had been shot by a local merchant; this incident provided the basis for the Boggs shooting in Huckleberry Finn . Two years later he witnessed the drowning of one of his friends, and only a few days later, when he and some friends were fishing on Sny Island, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, they discovered the drowned and mutilated body of a fugitive slave . As it turned out, Tom Blankenship’s older brother Bence had been secretly taking food to the runaway slave for some weeks before the slave was apparently discovered and killed. Bence’s act of courage and kindness served in some measure as a model for Huck’s decision to help the fugitive Jim in Huckleberry Finn .

After the death of his father, Sam Clemens worked at several odd jobs in town, and in 1848 he became a printer’s apprentice for Joseph P. Ament’s Missouri Courier . He lived sparingly in the Ament household but was allowed to continue his schooling and, from time to time, indulge in boyish amusements. Nevertheless, by the time Clemens was 13, his boyhood had effectively come to an end.

A Life Lived in a Rapidly Changing World: Samuel L. Clemens‚ 1835-1910

As twain’s books provide insight into the past‚ the events of his personal life further demonstrate his role as an eyewitness to history..

During his lifetime‚ Sam Clemens watched a young United States evolve from a nation torn apart by internal conflicts to one of international power. He experienced America’s vast growth and change – from westward expansion to industrialization‚ the end of slavery‚ advancements in technology‚ big government and foreign wars. And along the way‚ he often had something to say about the changes happening in his country.

The Early Years

Samuel Clemens was born on November 30‚ 1835 in Florida‚ Missouri‚ the sixth of seven children. At age 4‚ Sam and his family moved to the small frontier town of Hannibal‚ Missouri‚ on the banks of the Mississippi River. Missouri‚ at the time‚ was a fairly new state (it had gained statehood in 1821) and made up part of the country’s western border. It was also a state that took part in slavery. Sam’s father owned one enslaved person, and his uncle owned several. In fact‚ it was on his uncle’s farm that Sam spent many boyhood summers playing in the enslaved people’s quarters‚ listening to tall tales and the spirituals that he would enjoy throughout his life.

In 1847‚ when Sam was 11‚ his father died. Shortly thereafter he left school to work as a printer’s apprentice for a local newspaper. His job was to arrange the type for each of the newspaper’s stories‚ allowing Sam to read the news of the world while completing his work.

Twain’s Young Adult Life

At 18‚ Sam headed east to New York City and Philadelphia‚ where he worked on several different newspapers and found some success at writing articles. By 1857‚ he had returned home to embark on a new career as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River. With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861‚ however‚ all traffic along the river came to a halt‚ as did Sam’s pilot career. Inspired by the times‚ Sam joined up with a volunteer Confederate unit called the Marion Rangers‚ but he quit after just two weeks.

In search of a new career‚ Sam headed west in July 1861‚ at the invitation of his brother‚ Orion‚ who had just been appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory. Lured by the infectious hope of striking it rich in Nevada’s silver rush‚ Sam traveled across the open frontier from Missouri to Nevada by stagecoach. Along the journey Sam encountered Native American tribes for the first time, along with a variety of unique characters‚ mishaps, and disappointments. These events would find a way into his short stories and books‚ particularly   Roughing It .

After failing as a silver prospector‚ Sam began writing for the Territorial Enterprise‚ a Virginia City‚ Nevada newspaper where he used‚ for the first time‚ his pen name‚ Mark Twain. Seeking change, by 1864 Sam headed for San Francisco where he continued to write for local papers.

In 1865 Sam’s first “big break” came with the publication of his short story “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog ” in papers across the country. A year later Sam was hired by the Sacramento Union to visit and report on the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii). His writings were so popular that‚ upon his return‚ he embarked upon his first lecture tour‚ which established him as a successful stage performer.

Hired by the Alta California to continue his travel writing from the east‚ Sam arrived in New York City in 1867. He quickly signed up for a steamship tour of Europe and the “Holy Land.” His travel letters‚ full of vivid descriptions and tongue-in-cheek observations‚ met with such audience approval that they were later reworked into his first book‚  The Innocents Abroad , published in 1869. It was also on this trip that Clemens met his future brother-in-law‚ Charles Langdon. Langdon reportedly showed Sam a picture of his sister‚  Olivia ‚ and Sam fell in love at first sight.

Twain Starts a Family and Moves to Hartford

After courting for two years‚ Sam Clemens and Olivia (Livy) Langdon were married in 1870. They settled in Buffalo‚ New York‚ where Sam had become a partner‚ editor, and writer for the daily newspaper the  Buffalo Express . While they were living in Buffalo‚ their first child‚ Langdon Clemens‚ was born.

In 1871 Sam moved his family to Hartford‚ Connecticut‚ a city he had come to love while visiting his publisher there and where he had made friends. Livy also had family connections to the city. For the first few years the Clemenses rented a house in the heart of Nook Farm‚ a residential area that was home to numerous writers‚ publishers, and other prominent figures. In 1872 Sam’s recollections and tall tales from his frontier adventures were published in his book  Roughing It . That same year the Clemenses’ first daughter Susy was born‚ but their son‚ Langdon‚ died at age two from diphtheria.

In 1873 Sam’s focus turned toward social criticism. He and Hartford Courant publisher Charles Dudley Warner co-wrote  The Gilded Age ‚ a novel that attacked political corruption‚ big business, and the American obsession with getting rich that seemed to dominate the era. Ironically‚ a year after its publication‚ the Clemenses’ elaborate 25-room house on Farmington Avenue‚ which had cost the then-huge sum of $40‚000-$45‚000‚ was completed.

Twain Writes his Most Famous Books While Living in Hartford

For the next 17 years (1874-1891)‚ Sam‚ Livy, and their three daughters (Clara was born in 1874 and Jean in 1880) lived in the Hartford home. During those years Sam completed some of his most famous books‚ often finding a summer refuge for uninterrupted work at his sister-in-law’s farm in Elmira‚ New York. Novels such as  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer  (1876) and  Life on the Mississippi (1883) captured both his Missouri memories and depictions of the American scene. Yet his social commentary continued.  The Prince and the Pauper  (1881) explored class relations, as does  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court  (1889), which‚ going a step further‚ criticized oppression in general while examining the period’s explosion of new technologies. And‚ in perhaps his most famous work‚  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  (1884)‚ Clemens‚ by the way he attacked the institution of slavery‚ railed against the failures of Reconstruction and the continued poor treatment of African Americans in his own time.

Huckleberry Finn  was also the first book published by Sam’s own publishing company‚ The Charles L. Webster Company. In an attempt to gain control over publication as well as to make substantial profits‚ Sam created the company in 1884. A year later he contracted with Ulysses S. Grant to publish Grant’s memoirs; the two-volume set provided large royalties for Grant’s widow and was a financial success for the publisher as well.

Twain’s Financial Ruin and Subsequent Travels

Although Sam enjoyed financial success during his Hartford years‚ he continually made bad investments in new inventions‚ which eventually brought him to bankruptcy. In an effort to economize and pay back his debts‚ Sam and Livy moved their family to Europe in 1891. When his publishing company failed in 1894‚ Sam was forced to set out on a worldwide lecture tour to earn money. In 1896 tragedy struck when Susy Clemens‚ at age 24‚ died from meningitis while on a visit to the Hartford home. Unable to bear being in the place of her death‚ the Clemenses never returned to Hartford to live.

From 1891 until 1900‚ Sam and his family traveled throughout the world. During those years Sam witnessed the increasing exploitation of weaker governments by European powers‚ which he described in his book  Following the Equator  (1897). The Boer War in South Africa and the Boxer Rebellion in China fueled his growing anger toward imperialistic countries and their actions. With the Spanish-American and Philippine wars in 1898‚ Sam’s wrath was redirected toward the American government. When he returned to the United States in 1900‚ his finances restored‚ Sam readily declared himself an anti-imperialist and‚ from 1901 until his death‚ served as the vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League.

Twain’s Darkest Times and Late Life

In these later years‚ Sam’s writings turned dark. They began to focus on human greed and cruelty and questioned the humanity of the human race. His public speeches followed suit and included a harshly sarcastic public introduction of Winston Churchill in 1900. Even though Sam’s lecture tour had managed to get him out of debt‚ his anti-government writings and speeches threatened his livelihood once again. As Sam was labeled by some as a traitor‚ several of his works were never published during his lifetime, either because magazines would not accept them or because of his own personal fear that his marketable reputation would be ruined.

In 1903‚ after living in New York City for three years‚ Livy became ill, and Sam and his wife returned to Italy, where she died a year later. After her death‚ Sam lived in New York until 1908, when he moved into his last house‚ “Stormfield,” in Redding‚ Connecticut. In 1909 his middle daughter Clara was married. In the same year Jean‚ the youngest daughter‚ died from an epileptic seizure. Four months later, on April 21‚ 1910‚ Sam Clemens died at age 74.

Like any good journalist‚ Sam Clemens‚ a.k.a. Mark Twain‚ spent his life observing and reporting on his surroundings. In his writings he provided images of the romantic‚ the real‚ the strengths and weaknesses of a rapidly changing world. By examining his life and his works‚ we can read into the past – piecing together various events of the era and the responses to them. We can delve into the American mindset of the late nineteenth century and make our own observations of history‚ discover new connections‚ create new inferences and gain better insights into the time period and the people who lived in it. As Sam once wrote‚ “Supposing is good‚ but finding out is better.”

Mark Twain: His Life and His Humor

• Authors & Texts
• Top Picks Lists
• Study Guides
• Best Sellers
• Plays & Drama
• Shakespeare
• Short Stories
• Children's Books

• MLA, Harvard Graduate School of Design

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens Nov. 30, 1835 in the small town of Florida, MO, and raised in Hannibal, became one of the greatest American authors of all time. Known for his sharp wit and pithy commentary on society, politics, and the human condition, his many essays and novels, including the American classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , are a testament to his intelligence and insight. Using humor and satire to soften the edges of his keen observations and critiques, he revealed in his writing some of the injustices and absurdities of society and human existence, his own included. He was a humorist, writer, publisher, entrepreneur, lecturer, iconic celebrity (who always wore white at his lectures), political satirist, and social progressive .

He died on April 21, 1910 when Halley’s Comet was again visible in the night sky, as lore would have it, just as it had been when he was born 75 years earlier. Wryly and presciently, Twain had said, “I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: "Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.”  Twain died of a heart attack one day after the Comet appeared its brightest in 1910.

A complex, idiosyncratic person, he never liked to be introduced by someone else when lecturing, preferring instead to introduce himself as he did when beginning the following lecture, “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands” in 1866:

“Ladies and gentlemen: The next lecture in this course will be delivered this evening, by Samuel L. Clemens, a gentleman whose high character and unimpeachable integrity are only equalled by his comeliness of person and grace of manner. And I am the man! I was obliged to excuse the chairman from introducing me, because he never compliments anybody and I knew I could do it just as well.”

Twain was  a complicated mixture of southern boy and western ruffian striving to fit into elite Yankee culture. He wrote in his speech, Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims,1881 :

“I am a border-ruffian from the State of Missouri. I am a Connecticut Yankee by adoption. In me, you have Missouri morals, Connecticut culture; this, gentlemen, is the combination which makes the perfect man.”

Growing up in Hannibal, Missouri had a lasting influence on Twain, and working as a steamboat captain for several years before the Civil War was one of his greatest pleasures. While riding the steamboat he would observe the many passengers, learning much about their character and affect. His time working as a miner and a journalist in Nevada and California during the 1860s introduced him to the rough and tumble ways of the west, which is where, Feb. 3, 1863, he first used the pen name, Mark Twain, when writing one of his humorous essays for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise in Nevada.

Mark Twain was a riverboat term that means two fathoms, the point at which it is safe for the boat to navigate the waters. It seems that when Samuel Clemens adopted this pen name he also adopted another persona - a persona that represented the outspoken commoner, poking fun at the aristocrats in power, while Samuel Clemens, himself, strove to be one of them.

Twain got his first big break as a writer in 1865 with an article about life in a mining camp, called Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog , also called The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County . It was very favorably received and printed in newspapers and magazines all over the country. From there he received other jobs, sent to Hawaii, and then to Europe and the Holy Land as a travel writer. Out of these travels he wrote the book, The Innocents Abroad , in 1869, which became a bestseller. His books and essays were generally so well-regarded that he started lecturing and promoting them, becoming popular both as a writer and a speaker.

When he married Olivia Langdon in 1870, he married into a wealthy family from Elmira, New York and moved east to Buffalo, NY and then to Hartford, CT where he collaborated with the Hartford Courant Publisher to co-write The Gilded Age, a satirical novel about greed and corruption among the wealthy after the Civil War. Ironically, this was also the society to which he aspired and gained entry. But Twain had his share of losses, too - loss of fortune investing in failed inventions (and failing to invest in successful ones such as Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone ), and the deaths of people he loved, such as his younger brother in a riverboat accident, for which he felt responsible, and several of his children and his beloved wife.

Although Twain survived, thrived, and made a living out of humor, his humor was borne out of sorrow, a complicated view of life, an understanding of life’s contradictions, cruelties, and absurdities.  As he once said, “ There is no laughter in heaven .” 

Mark Twain’s style of humor was wry, pointed, memorable, and delivered in a slow drawl. Twain’s humor carried on the tradition of humor of the Southwest, consisting of tall tales, myths, and frontier sketches, informed by his experiences growing up in Hannibal, MO, as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, and as a gold miner and journalist in Nevada and California.

In 1863 Mark Twain attended in Nevada the lecture of Artemus Ward (pseudonym of Charles Farrar Browne,1834-1867), one of America’s best-known humorists of the 19th century. They became friends, and Twain learned much from him about how to make people laugh. Twain believed that how a story was told was what made it funny  - repetition, pauses, and an air of naivety.

In his essay How to Tell a Story Twain says, “There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind—the humorous. I will talk mainly about that one.” He describes what makes a story funny, and what distinguishes the American story from that of the English or French; namely that the American story is humorous, the English is comic, and the French is witty.

He explains how they differ:

“The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter. The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular; but the comic and witty stories must be brief and end with a point. The humorous story bubbles gently along, the others burst. The humorous story is strictly a work of art, — high and delicate art, — and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it. The art of telling a humorous story —- understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print — was created in America, and has remained at home.”

Other important characteristics of a good humorous story, according to Twain, include the following:

• A humorous story is told gravely, as though there is nothing funny about it.
• The story is told wanderingly and the point is “slurred.”
• A “studied remark” is made as if without even knowing it, “as if one were thinking aloud.”
• The pause: “The pause is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story, and a frequently recurring feature, too. It is a dainty thing, and delicate, and also uncertain and treacherous; for it must be exactly the right length--no more and no less—or it fails of its purpose and makes trouble. If the pause is too short the impressive point is passed, and the audience have had time to divine that a surprise is intended—and then you can't surprise them, of course.”

Twain believed in telling a story in an understated way, almost as if he was letting his audience in on a secret. He cites a story, The Wounded Soldier , as an example and to explain the difference in the different manners of storytelling, explaining that:

 “The American would conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it…. the American tells it in a ‘rambling and disjointed’ fashion and pretends that he does not know that it is funny at all,” whereas “The European ‘tells you beforehand that it is one of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it with eager delight, and is the first person to laugh when he gets through.” ….”All of which,” Mark Twain sadly comments, “is very depressing, and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life.”

Twain’s folksy, irreverent, understated style of humor, use of vernacular language, and seemingly forgetful rambling prose and strategic pauses drew his audience in, making them seem smarter than he. His intelligent satirical wit, impeccable timing, and ability to subtly poke fun at both himself and the elite made him accessible to a wide audience, and made him one of the most successful comedians of his time and one that has had a lasting influence on future comics and humorists.

Humor was absolutely essential to Mark Twain, helping him navigate life just as he learned to navigate the Mississippi when a young man, reading the depths and nuances of the human condition like he learned to see the subtleties and complexities of the river beneath its surface. He learned to create humor out of confusion and absurdity, bringing laughter into the lives of others as well. He once said, “Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”

MARK TWAIN PRIZE

Twain was much admired during his lifetime and recognized as an American icon. A  prize created in his honor, The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, the nation’s top comedy honor, has been given annually since 1998 to “people who have had an impact on American society in ways similar to the distinguished 19th century novelist and essayist best known as Mark Twain.” Previous recipients of the prize have included some of the most notable humorists of our time. The 2017 prizewinner is David Letterman, who according to Dave Itzkoff, New York Times writer , “Like Mark Twain …distinguished himself as a cockeyed, deadpan observer of American behavior and, later in life, for his prodigious and distinctive facial hair. Now the two satirists share a further connection.”

One can only wonder what remarks Mark Twain would make today about our government, ourselves, and the absurdities of our world. But undoubtedly they would be insightful and humorous to help us “stand against the assault” and perhaps even give us pause.

RESOURCES AND FURTHER READING

• Burns, Ken , Ken Burns Mark Twain Part I, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-x_k7zrPUw
• Burns, Ken , Ken Burns Mark Twain Part II https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1arrRQJkA28
• Mark Twain , http://www.cmgww.com/historic/twain/index.php/about/biography/
• Mark Twain , history.com , http://www.history.com/topics/mark-twain
• Railton, Stephen and University of Virginia Library, Mark Twain In His Times , http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/about/mtabout.html
• Mark Twain’s Interactive Scrapbook, PBS, http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/index.html
• Mark Twain’s America , IMAX,, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0WioOn8Tkw (Video)
• Middlekauff, Robert, Mark Twain’s Humor - With Examples , https://amphilsoc.org/sites/default/files/proceedings/150305.pdf
• Moss, Walter, Mark Twain’s Progressive and Prophetic Political Humor, http://hollywoodprogressive.com/mark-twain/
• The Mark Twain House and Museum , https://www.marktwainhouse.org/man/biography_main.php

For Teachers :

• Learn More About Mark Twain , PBS, http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/learnmore/index.html
• Lesson 1: Mark Twain and American Humor, National Endowment for the Humanities, https://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson-plan/mark-twain-and-american-humor#sect-introduction
• Lesson Plan | Mark Twain and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor , WGBH, PBS, https://mass.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/773460a8-d817-4fbd-9c1e-15656712348e/lesson-plan-mark-twain-and-the-mark-twain-prize-for-american-humor/#.WT2Y_DMfn-Y
• What Were Mark Twain's Inventions?
• The Story of Samuel Clemens as "Mark Twain"
• Who's the Real Huckleberry Finn?
• The Meaning of the Pseudonym Mark Twain
• Enslavement in Mark Twain's 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'
• 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' Quotes
• Mark Twain's Views on Enslavement
• Mark Twain's "A Letter From Santa Claus"
• 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' Summary and Takeaways
• A Reading List of the Best 19th Century Novels
• Biography of Samuel Johnson, 18th Century Writer and Lexicographer
• Biography of Willa Cather, American Author
• Biography of Washington Irving, Father of the American Short Story
• The Life and Work of H.G. Wells
• Biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne
• List of Works by James Fenimore Cooper

(1835-1910)

Who Was Mark Twain?

Mark Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens, was the celebrated author of several novels, including two major classics of American literature: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . He was also a riverboat pilot, journalist, lecturer, entrepreneur and inventor.

Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the tiny village of Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, the sixth child of John and Jane Clemens. When he was 4 years old, his family moved to nearby Hannibal, a bustling river town of 1,000 people.

John Clemens worked as a storekeeper, lawyer, judge and land speculator, dreaming of wealth but never achieving it, sometimes finding it hard to feed his family. He was an unsmiling fellow; according to one legend, young Sam never saw his father laugh.

His mother, by contrast, was a fun-loving, tenderhearted homemaker who whiled away many a winter's night for her family by telling stories. She became head of the household in 1847 when John died unexpectedly.

The Clemens family "now became almost destitute," wrote biographer Everett Emerson, and was forced into years of economic struggle — a fact that would shape the career of Twain.

Twain in Hannibal

Twain stayed in Hannibal until age 17. The town, situated on the Mississippi River, was in many ways a splendid place to grow up.

Steamboats arrived there three times a day, tooting their whistles; circuses, minstrel shows and revivalists paid visits; a decent library was available; and tradesmen such as blacksmiths and tanners practiced their entertaining crafts for all to see.

However, violence was commonplace, and young Twain witnessed much death: When he was nine years old, he saw a local man murder a cattle rancher, and at 10 he watched an enslaved person die after a white overseer struck him with a piece of iron.

Hannibal inspired several of Twain's fictional locales, including "St. Petersburg" in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. These imaginary river towns are complex places: sunlit and exuberant on the one hand, but also vipers' nests of cruelty, poverty, drunkenness, loneliness and soul-crushing boredom — all parts of Twain's boyhood experience.

Sam kept up his schooling until he was about 12 years old, when — with his father dead and the family needing a source of income — he found employment as an apprentice printer at the Hannibal Courier , which paid him with a meager ration of food. In 1851, at 15, he got a job as a printer and occasional writer and editor at the Hannibal Western Union , a little newspaper owned by his brother, Orion.

Steamboat Pilot

Twain loved his career — it was exciting, well-paying and high-status, roughly akin to flying a jetliner today. However, his service was cut short in 1861 by the outbreak of the Civil War , which halted most civilian traffic on the river.

As the Civil War began, the people of Missouri angrily split between support for the Union and the Confederate States . Twain opted for the latter, joining the Confederate Army in June 1861 but serving for only a couple of weeks until his volunteer unit disbanded.

Where, he wondered then, would he find his future? What venue would bring him both excitement and cash? His answer: the great American West.

Heading Out West

In July 1861, Twain climbed on board a stagecoach and headed for Nevada and California, where he would live for the next five years.

At first, he prospected for silver and gold, convinced that he would become the savior of his struggling family and the sharpest-dressed man in Virginia City and San Francisco. But nothing panned out, and by the middle of 1862, he was flat broke and in need of a regular job.

Twain knew his way around a newspaper office, so that September, he went to work as a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise . He churned out news stories, editorials and sketches, and along the way adopted the pen name Mark Twain — steamboat slang for 12 feet of water.

Twain became one of the best-known storytellers in the West. He honed a distinctive narrative style — friendly, funny, irreverent, often satirical and always eager to deflate the pretentious.

He got a big break in 1865, when one of his tales about life in a mining camp, "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," was printed in newspapers and magazines around the country (the story later appeared under various titles).

'Innocents Abroad'

His next step up the ladder of success came in 1867, when he took a five-month sea cruise in the Mediterranean, writing humorously about the sights for American newspapers with an eye toward getting a book out of the trip.

In 1869, The Innocents Abroad was published, and it became a nationwide bestseller.

At 34, this handsome, red-haired, affable, canny, egocentric and ambitious journalist and traveler had become one of the most popular and famous writers in America.

Marriage to Olivia Langdon

However, Twain worried about being a Westerner. In those years, the country's cultural life was dictated by an Eastern establishment centered in New York City and Boston — a straight-laced, Victorian , moneyed group that cowed Twain.

"An indisputable and almost overwhelming sense of inferiority bounced around his psyche," wrote scholar Hamlin Hill, noting that these feelings were competing with his aggressiveness and vanity. Twain's fervent wish was to get rich, support his mother, rise socially and receive what he called "the respectful regard of a high Eastern civilization."

In February 1870, he improved his social status by marrying 24-year-old Olivia (Livy) Langdon, the daughter of a rich New York coal merchant. Writing to a friend shortly after his wedding, Twain could not believe his good luck: "I have ... the only sweetheart I have ever loved ... she is the best girl, and the sweetest, and gentlest, and the daintiest, and she is the most perfect gem of womankind."

Livy, like many people during that time, took pride in her pious, high-minded, genteel approach to life. Twain hoped that she would "reform" him, a mere humorist, from his rustic ways. The couple settled in Buffalo and later had four children.

DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHY'S MARK TWAIN FACT CARD

Mark Twain's Books

Thankfully, Twain's glorious "low-minded" Western voice broke through on occasion.

'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer'

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in 1876, and soon thereafter he began writing a sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Writing this work, commented biographer Everett Emerson, freed Twain temporarily from the "inhibitions of the culture he had chosen to embrace."

'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Twain called Huckleberry Finn ," Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1935, giving short shrift to Herman Melville and others but making an interesting point.

Hemingway's comment refers specifically to the colloquial language of Twain's masterpiece, as for perhaps the first time in America, the vivid, raw, not-so-respectable voice of the common folk was used to create great literature.

Huck Finn required years to conceptualize and write, and Twain often put it aside. In the meantime, he pursued respectability with the 1881 publication of The Prince and the Pauper , a charming novel endorsed with enthusiasm by his genteel family and friends.

'Life on the Mississippi'

In 1883 he put out Life on the Mississippi , an interesting but safe travel book. When Huck Finn finally was published in 1884, Livy gave it a chilly reception.

After that, business and writing were of equal value to Twain as he set about his cardinal task of earning a lot of money. In 1885, he triumphed as a book publisher by issuing the bestselling memoirs of former President Ulysses S. Grant , who had just died.

He lavished many hours on this and other business ventures, and was certain that his efforts would be rewarded with enormous wealth, but he never achieved the success he expected. His publishing house eventually went bankrupt.

'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court'

Twain's financial failings, reminiscent in some ways of his father's, had serious consequences for his state of mind. They contributed powerfully to a growing pessimism in him, a deep-down feeling that human existence is a cosmic joke perpetrated by a chuckling God.

Another cause of his angst, perhaps, was his unconscious anger at himself for not giving undivided attention to his deepest creative instincts, which centered on his Missouri boyhood.

In 1889, Twain published A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court , a science-fiction/historical novel about ancient England. His next major work, in 1894, was The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson , a somber novel that some observers described as "bitter."

He also wrote short stories, essays and several other books, including a study of Joan of Arc . Some of these later works have enduring merit, and his unfinished work The Chronicle of Young Satan has fervent admirers today.

Twain's last 15 years were filled with public honors, including degrees from Oxford and Yale . Probably the most famous American of the late 19th century, he was much photographed and applauded wherever he went.

Indeed, he was one of the most prominent celebrities in the world, traveling widely overseas, including a successful 'round-the-world lecture tour in 1895-96, undertaken to pay off his debts.

Family Struggles

But while those years were gilded with awards, they also brought him much anguish. Early in their marriage, he and Livy had lost their toddler son, Langdon, to diphtheria; in 1896, his favorite daughter, Susy, died at the age of 24 of spinal meningitis. The loss broke his heart, and adding to his grief, he was out of the country when it happened.

His youngest daughter, Jean, was diagnosed with severe epilepsy. In 1909, when she was 29 years old, Jean died of a heart attack. For many years, Twain's relationship with middle daughter Clara was distant and full of quarrels.

In June 1904, while Twain traveled, Livy died after a long illness. "The full nature of his feelings toward her is puzzling," wrote scholar R. Kent Rasmussen. "If he treasured Livy's comradeship as much as he often said, why did he spend so much time away from her?"

But absent or not, throughout 34 years of marriage, Twain had indeed loved his wife. "Wheresoever she was, there was Eden," he wrote in tribute to her.

Twain became somewhat bitter in his later years, even while projecting an amiable persona to his public. In private he demonstrated a stunning insensitivity to friends and loved ones.

"Much of the last decade of his life, he lived in hell," wrote Hamlin Hill. He wrote a fair amount but was unable to finish most of his projects. His memory faltered.

Twain suffered volcanic rages and nasty bouts of paranoia, and he experienced many periods of depressed indolence, which he tried to assuage by smoking cigars, reading in bed and playing endless hours of billiards and cards.

Twain died on April 21, 1910, at the age of 74. He was buried in Elmira, New York.

The Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, is now a popular attraction and is designated a National Historic Landmark.

Twain is remembered as a great chronicler of American life in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Writing grand tales about Sawyer, Finn and the mighty Mississippi River, Twain explored the American soul with wit, buoyancy and a sharp eye for truth.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Mark Twain
• Birth Year: 1835
• Birth date: November 30, 1835
• Birth State: Missouri
• Birth City: Florida
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Mark Twain, the writer, adventurer and wily social critic born Samuel Clemens, wrote the novels 'Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.’
• Writing and Publishing
• Astrological Sign: Sagittarius
• Death Year: 1910
• Death date: April 21, 1910
• Death State: Connecticut
• Death City: Redding
• Death Country: United States

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Mark Twain Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/mark-twain
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: March 31, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 3, 2014
• This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other 364.
• Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.
• New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions.
• The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.
• I'd rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I've got so much more of it.
• Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
• Do not put off 'til tomorrow what can be put off 'til day-after-tomorrow just as well.
• In order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.
• 'Classic'—a book which people praise and don't read.
• When angry, count four. When very angry, swear.
• Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
• We can't reach old age by another man's road. My habits protect my life, but would assassinate you.
• Be good and you will be lonesome.

Watch Next .css-16toot1:after{background-color:#262626;color:#fff;margin-left:1.8rem;margin-top:1.25rem;width:1.5rem;height:0.063rem;content:'';display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;}

Famous Authors & Writers

Alice Munro

Agatha Christie

A Huge Shakespeare Mystery, Solved

9 Surprising Facts About Truman Capote

William Shakespeare

How Did Shakespeare Die?

Meet Stand-Up Comedy Pioneer Charles Farrar Browne

Francis Scott Key

Christine de Pisan

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

A Short Biography of Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on 30 th November 1835 in Missouri to John and Jane Clemens. At four years of age, he shifted to Hannibal, a small town of almost 1000 people, with his family.

In 1861, he lived for the next five years in Nevada and California. Initially, his prospect was good, and he became his family’s savior. However, in 1862, he again started looking for a regular job.

Twain published A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in 1889. It is a science fiction and historical novel about ancient England. In 1894, he published The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson , Twain’s next major work. It is a somber novel often described as “bitter.”

Mark Twain’s Writing Style

Southwestern humor.

The writing style of Mark Twain is categorized as Southwestern humor. This is the regional style of humor that characterizes common language and also implied unpolished humor along with the dosses of cruelty. He employed characters and situations in which the tricksters achieved victory.

Twain has taken the majority of his characters from his real-life; particularly, he introduced characters as models of people he encountered at Hannibal. For instance, the characters such as riverboat, slave dealers, gamblers, and travelers are taken from Hannibal. In Huckleberry Finn, the character of Jim is a very famous Hannibal model.

The Divided Nature of Twain’s Work

For example, in the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in the descriptions of the adventures of the King and the Duke, the readers observe Twain’s criticism while showing the predatory nature of a man who exploits the people in their most vulnerable conditions. By using the artless narrator, Twain describes how Wilks’ family falls prey to two scoundrels after the death of their father. The slaves are immediately sold by the king. Huck observes the grief of the family at the loss of their servants as:

Distinguishing Characteristics

Besides the employment of vernacular dialogues, the setting of Twain’s novels is nearly intense through the use of imagery. The combination of imagery and dialogue creates a sense of realism to the settings and characters. Thus it permits the readers to allow a better understanding of the story and develops an interesting relationship between characters and readers.

Through descriptive language and imagery, Mark Twain establishes a typical feel of Southern St. Petersburg and determined and luxurious elements. Twain often uses figurative devices such as metaphors and similes, to create a scene. This imagery serves to carry the readers from one scene to another. For example, the night that follows when Tom Sawyer witnesses the murder in Doctor Robinson in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer :

Social commentary and emotional satire play an important role in many of the works of Mark Twain. Twain is known for his satire on society of America both in his literary works and personal life. The way Twain communicates his views does not appear to be excessively obvious through the eyes of his characters and the personal development they experience throughout the plot.

Works Of Mark Twain

Short Stories

A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

And as Ernest Hemingway wisely observed: "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn ." "

We’re fighting to restore access to 500,000+ books in court this week. Join us!

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

The complete short stories of mark twain

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

25 Previews

DOWNLOAD OPTIONS

No suitable files to display here.

PDF access not available for this item.

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by station46.cebu on June 24, 2022

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

• Fundamentals NEW

• Biographies
• Compare Countries
• World Atlas

Twain’s real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Mark Twain was the name he used as a writer. He was born on November 30, 1835, in the small town of Florida, Missouri. When he was 4 years old he moved with his family to Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi River.

In 1847 Samuel’s father died. From then on Samuel had to help support the family. At age 13 he started working with a local printer. Later he worked as a printer for newspapers in Saint Louis, Missouri; New York City; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In the late 1850s and early 1860s he piloted steamboats on the Mississippi.

Clemens also wrote humorous stories for newspapers. In the 1860s he started writing under the name Mark Twain. In 1865 he published a story called “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” It made him famous.

In the 1870s Twain settled with his family in Hartford, Connecticut. There he wrote his most famous books. He used his experiences growing up on the Mississippi River to write many of his stories. His novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) is a story about a boy and his friends in a small river town. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) tells of a boy’s adventures as he floats down the Mississippi on a raft. Huckleberry Finn was his best book.

Late in life Twain lived mainly in Europe with his family. He died in Redding, Connecticut, on April 21, 1910.

It’s here: the NEW Britannica Kids website!

We’ve been busy, working hard to bring you new features and an updated design. We hope you and your family enjoy the NEW Britannica Kids. Take a minute to check out all the enhancements!

• The same safe and trusted content for explorers of all ages.
• Accessible across all of today's devices: phones, tablets, and desktops.
• Improved homework resources designed to support a variety of curriculum subjects and standards.
• A new, third level of content, designed specially to meet the advanced needs of the sophisticated scholar.
• And so much more!

Want to see it in action?

Start a free trial

To share with more than one person, separate addresses with a comma

Choose a language from the menu above to view a computer-translated version of this page. Please note: Text within images is not translated, some features may not work properly after translation, and the translation may not accurately convey the intended meaning. Britannica does not review the converted text.

After translating an article, all tools except font up/font down will be disabled. To re-enable the tools or to convert back to English, click "view original" on the Google Translate toolbar.

• Privacy Notice
• Terms of Use