Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910),better known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American humorist, satirist, writer, and lecturer. Twain is most noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He is also known for his quotations.

During his lifetime, Clemens became a well known author in the United States, a popular comedian and monologist, and friend to presidents, artists, leading industrialists, and European royalty. Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been called a Great American Novel.

Clemens enjoyed immense public popularity and his keen wit and incisive satire earned him praise from both critics and peers. American author William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature."

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, to Tennessee country merchant, John Marshall Clemens (August 11, 1798 - March 24, 1847), and Jane Lampton Clemens (June 18, 1803 - October 27, 1890).

When Samuel was four, his family moved to Hannibal,a port town on the Mississippi River that would serve as the inspiration for the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At that time, Missouri was a slave state in the union and young Samuel became familiar with the institution of slavery, a theme he later explored in his writing.

In 1851 he began working as a typesetter and contributor of articles and humorous sketches for the Hannibal Journal, a newspaper owned by his older brother, Orion. When he was eighteen, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati and At twenty-two, Clemens returned to Missouri. On a voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi, the steamboat pilot, "Bixby", inspired Clemens to pursue a career as a steamboat pilot.

Because the steamboats at the time were constructed of very dry flammable wood, no lamps were allowed, making night travel a precarious endeavor. A steamboat pilot needed a vast knowledge of the ever-changing river to be able to stop at any of the hundreds of ports and wood-lots along the river banks. Clemens meticulously studied two thousand miles of the Mississippi for more than two years until he finally received his steamboat pilot license in 1859.

Twain’s major published work, Huckleberry Finn, solidified him as a great American writer after the production of what some call the elusive great American novel. Finn was an offshoot from Tom Sawyer and proved to have a more serious tone than its predecessor. The main premise behind Huckleberry Finn is the young boy’s belief in the right thing to do even though the majority of society believes that it was wrong.

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