Mark Twain, orig. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, (born Nov. 30, 1835, Florida, Mo., U.S.—died April 21, 1910, Redding, Conn.), U.S. humorist, writer, and lecturer. He grew up in Hannibal, Mo., on the Mississippi River and was apprenticed in 1848 to a local printer. He received a riverboat pilot’s license in 1859 and later moved on to Nevada and California. In 1863 he took his pseudonym, the riverman’s term for water 2 fathoms (12 ft [3.7 m]) deep. In a California mining camp he heard the story that he first published in 1865 and made famous as the title story of his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867). He traveled widely, using his travels as subject matter for lectures and books, from the humorous narratives The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872) to Life on the Mississippi (1883), his reflections on being a riverboat captain. He won a worldwide audience for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1885), one of the masterpieces of American fiction. The satirical A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and increasingly grim works including Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) and The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899) followed. In the 1890s financial speculations bankrupted him. His eldest daughter died in 1896, his wife in 1904, and another daughter in 1909. He expressed his pessimism about human character in such late works as the posthumously published Letters from the Earth (1962).
Related Summaries
