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Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne
Clemens) (1835-1910)
 Twain
is on nearly everyone's list of all-time great American
authors. Twain was raised in Hannibal, Missouri and as a
young man held a series of jobs which included work as a
printer's apprentice, a Mississippi riverboat pilot, and a
newspaperman in Nevada and San Francisco. He moved gradually
from journalism to travel writing and then to fiction, aided
by the success of his 1869 travel memoir The Innocents
Abroad. His humorous tales of human nature, especially The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn
(1885), remain standard texts in high school and college
literature classes. In his own day Twain was a tremendously
popular figure and a celebrated public speaker who toured
widely. Other Twain classics include Life on the
Mississippi (1883) and A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court (1889) and the short story The
Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867).
Extra credit:
Twain was born and died in years in which Halley's comet
passed by Earth: 1835 and 1910... His pseudonym, Mark Twain,
was taken from Mississippi riverboat terminology; it's a
measure of depth... Twain married the former Olivia Langdon
in 1870; she died in 1904, and the melancholy tone of
Twain's later writings is often attributed to his depression
over her death.
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