Mark Twain {Samuel Langhorne Clemens} - [klèm´enz] American Author/Humorist/Riverboat Pilot Born: November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri. Died: April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut at age 74. Location Interred: Beside his wife in Woodlawn Cemetery, Elmira, Chemung County, New York. --Biographical information from: http://www.cliffsnotes.com

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) was born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. In 1839 the Clemens News moved to Twain's boyhood home, Hannibal, Missouri. Like many authors of his day, he had little formal training in writing; most of his education came from the print shops and newspaper offices where he worked as a youth. He was also a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River until the American Civil War brought an end to travel on the river.

In the first year of the war, 1861, Clemens and his brother journeyed to the newly created Nevada Territory, where they engaged in silver mining. The next year he became a reporter with the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada, and soon after he began signing his articles with the pseudonym "Mark Twain," a Mississippi River phrase meaning "two fathoms deep." He went as far west as he could in 1864, to live in San Francisco. There he met American writers Artemus Ward and Bret Harte who encouraged him in his work. He wrote 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County', the first story of his to become popular, in 1865, loosely based on a story he had heard circulating around the California gold fields.

Twain continued to travel as a correspondent for various newspapers, and in 1869 his travel letters from Europe were collected into the popular The Innocents Abroad. Encouraged by his success, Twain settled down in Hartford, Connecticut, and began his most productive years as a writer. He married Olivia Langdon and had two daughters, Susy and Clara. Between 1873 and 1889 he wrote seven novels, including 'The Prince and the Pauper' (1882), a children's book about switched identities in Tudor England, and 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' (1889), a satire on oppression in feudal England.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the sequel to Tom Sawyer, is considered Twain's masterpiece, as it reveals best his skill in capturing the rhythms of American life of the time. The story is told from the perspective of the boy Huck who flees civilization by rafting down the Mississippi River with a runaway slave, Jim. Their adventures expose them to the cruelty of which men and women are capable. Another theme of the novel is the conflict between Huck's friendship with Jim, who is one of the few people he can trust, and his knowledge that he is breaking the law by helping a slave escape. Taken together, Huck's adventures provide the reader with a panorama of American life along the Mississippi before the Civil War.

Also in 1884, Twain formed the firm Charles L. Webster and Company to publish his and other writers works, notably 'Personal Memoirs' (two volumes, 1885-1886) by Ulysses S. Grant, Civil War general and U.S. President. However, an investment in an automatic typesetting machine led to the firm's bankruptcy in 1894.

Twain's work during the 1890s and the 1900s is marked by growing pessimism and bitterness caused by disappointments in business and, later, the deaths of his wife and two daughters. Significant works of this period are 'Pudd'nhead Wilson' (1894), a novel set in the South before the Civil War that uses mistaken racial identities to criticize racism, and 'Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc' (1896), a sentimental biography.

In later years, because he was a celebrity, he spoke out on public issues frequently, wearing the white linen suit he came to be known for on public occasions. He died in 1910, leaving his autobiography unfinished. It was eventually edited by his secretary, Albert Bigelow Paine, and published in 1924.

Eighty years after his death, the first half of a handwritten manuscript of 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' was discovered in Hollywood, California. After a series of legal battles over ownership, the manuscript, including previously unpublished material, was rejoined to its second half, which had been kept in a New York public library. The revised 'Huckleberry Finn' was published in 1996.

The untamed and unconventional West inspired Twain's work, and his success opened up a Western genre for generations of authors. In his own time he was renowned as a humorist but was not always appreciated by his contemporaries as anything more than that. Yet his adherence to American themes, settings, and language sets him apart from them. In the next century, both Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner pointed to Twain as an inspiration for their own writing. Twain portrayed his subjects with humorous and colloquial, yet poetic, language, and as a man of letters, he was a large part of the creation of a uniquely American narrative.

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