Mark

Twain
30.11.1835
21.04.1910
Samuel Langhorne
Clemens, better
known by his pen
name Mark Twain,
was an American
author and humorist.
He wrote The
Adventures of Tom
Sawyer (1876) and its
sequel, Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn
(1885).
 The alias
On a voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi,
steamboat pilot Horace E. Bixby inspired Twain to become a
pilot himself. Twain studied 2,000 miles of the Mississippi for
more than two years before he received his steamboat pilot
license in 1859. This occupation gave him his pen name,
Mark Twain, from "mark twain," the cry for a measured river
depth of two fathoms.
 Early life
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
was born in Florida, Missouri, on
November 30, 1835. He was
the sixth of seven children, but
only three of his siblings
survived.
When he was four, Twain's
family moved to Hannibal,
Missouri, a port town on the
Mississippi River that inspired
the fictional town of St.
Petersburg in The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer and Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn. Twain's father
was an attorney and judge.
 In 1847, when Twain was 11, his
Early life father died of pneumonia. The next
year, he became a printer's
apprentice. In 1851, he began
working as a typesetter and
contributor of articles and humorous
sketches for the Hannibal Journal, a
newspaper owned by his brother
Orion. When he was 18, he left
Hannibal and worked as a printer in
New York City, Philadelphia, St.
Louis, and Cincinnati. He joined the
newly formed International
Typographical Union, the printers
union, and educated himself in public
libraries in the evenings, finding wider
information than at a conventional
school.
Clemens came from St. Louis on the
packet Keokuk in 1854 and lived in
Early life
Muscatine during part of the summer
of 1855. The Muscatine newspaper
published eight stories, which
amounted to almost 6,000 words.
At the start of the Civil War, Twain
enlisted briefly in a Confederate local
unit. He then left for Nevada to work
for his brother, a senior official in the
Federal government. Twain later
wrote a sketch, "The Private History
of a Campaign That Failed," which
told how he and his friends had been
Confederate volunteers for two
weeks before disbanding their
company.
Mark Twain
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
Twain's major publication was The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer, which drew on his youth in Hannibal. The book
also introduced in a supporting role Huckleberry Finn,
based on Twain's boyhood friend Tom Blankenship.
 The Prince and the Pauper
Telling the story of two boys born on the same
day who are physically identical, the book acts
as a social commentary as the prince and
pauper switch places. Pauper was Twain's
first attempt at historical fiction, and blame for
its shortcomings is usually put on Twain for
having not been experienced enough in
English society, and also on the fact that it
was produced after a massive hit. In between
the writing of Pauper, Twain had started
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and started
and completed another travel book, A Tramp
Abroad, which follows Twain as he traveled
through central and southern Europe.
End