Author: Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was born in 1835 in Florida, Missouri, and grew up in Hannibal on the banks of the Mississippi. Most of his fiction would later draw on that childhood, sometimes directly. He worked as a printer's apprentice, then as a steamboat pilot, which is where the pen name comes from. Mark twain is a riverboat call meaning two fathoms deep, safe water. After the Civil War shut down river traffic he tried silver prospecting in Nevada, then journalism in San Francisco, then humorous travel writing, and somewhere in there he became the most famous American author of his time.He published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876 and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884. Between and around those two he wrote The Innocents Abroad, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, and a stack of essays and lectures that mostly hold up better than they should. He was funny and he was angry, sometimes in the same paragraph.His later years were darker. He outlived his wife and two of his daughters and wrote increasingly bitter material about human nature, religion, and American imperialism. He died in 1910, the year Halley's Comet returned, which he had predicted. His best work still reads like a friend telling you a story across a long evening. The voice is what survived.