Mark Twain

The name Mark Twain began on the water. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, took his famous pen name from the leadsman’s cry for a safe river depth of two fathoms on the Mississippi. He would become an American writer, humorist, and essayist whose voice seemed to carry the sound of the river towns, print shops, mining camps, lecture halls, and arguments of the nineteenth-century United States.

Clemens grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, a port town on the Mississippi River that later inspired the fictional St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Missouri was a slave state during his childhood, and slavery became a theme in those books. After his father died of pneumonia in 1847, when Clemens was 11, he left school the next year after the fifth grade and became a printer’s apprentice. By 1851, he was working as a typesetter and contributing articles and humorous sketches to the Hannibal Journal, owned by his older brother Orion.

Restless and self-taught, Twain worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, and educated himself in public libraries in the evenings. But one ambition stood above the rest in his boyhood world: to be a steamboatman. He trained as a riverboat pilot under Horace E. Bixby, learning the Mississippi’s currents, channels, reefs, snags, and shifting dangers before receiving his pilot’s license. That close reading of the river later fed Life on the Mississippi (1883), and it helped shape the practical, watchful intelligence that runs through his writing.

After the river, Twain went west to join Orion in Nevada. He joked about his lack of success at mining and turned to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. His first major success came with the humorous story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” published in 1865 and based on a story he heard at the Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, while he had been working as a miner. The story brought him international attention. From there, he wrote fiction and non-fiction, became a sought-after speaker, and earned praise for a wit that could be playful, sharp, and unsparing.

Twain’s best-known books include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), often called the “Great American Novel,” A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894). He also cowrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner. William Faulkner later called him “the father of American literature,” and Twain was praised as the “greatest humorist the United States has produced.” Yet his life was not only applause. He made a great deal of money from writing and lectures, lost most of it in failed investments such as the Paige Compositor, filed for bankruptcy, and later paid all his creditors in full.

In his later public life, Twain spoke forcefully against American colonialism. After first supporting American interests in the Hawaiian Islands, he reversed his position and served as vice president of the American Anti-Imperialist League from 1901 until his death in 1910. He opposed the Philippine-American War and published “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” in 1905 about Belgian atrocities in the Congo Free State. Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, the day after Halley’s Comet was closest to the Sun, just as he had predicted in his own comic, cosmic way. His words still travel well because they cut through pose and pretense. As one line attributed to him on this site puts it, “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”