MARK TWAIN

Mark Twain
samuel Langhorne Clemens
Born
November 30, 1835(1835-11-30)Florida, Missouri, United States
Died
April 21, 1910 (aged 74)Redding, Connecticut
Pen name
Mark Twain
Occupation
Writer, lecturer
Nationality
American
Genres
Fiction, historical fiction, children's literature, non-fiction, travel literature, satire, essay, philosophical literature, social commentary, literary criticism
Notable work(s)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Influences rtemus Ward, Charles Dickens, Thomas Paine, Alexander Macfarlane, Josh Billings
Influenced Kurt Vonnegut, Gore Vidal, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, H. L. Mencken, Hunter S. Thompson, Hal Holbrook, Jimmy Buffett, Ron Powers, Ralph Ellison, Ken Kesey
Biography

Early life
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835 to a Tennessee country merchant, John Marshall Clemens (August 11, 1798–March 24, 1847), and Jane Lampton Clemens (June 18, 1803–October 27, 1890). He was the sixth of seven children. Only three of his siblings survived childhood: his brothers Orion (July 17, 1825–December 11, 1897) and Henry (July 13, 1838–June 21, 1858) and his sister Pamela (September 19, 1827–August 31, 1904). His sister Margaret (May 31, 1830–August 17, 1839) died when Twain was four years old, and his brother Benjamin (June 8, 1832–May 12, 1842) died three years later. Another brother, Pleasant (1828–1829), died at the age of six months. He was born two weeks after the closest approach to Earth of Halley's Comet (see 1835 comment).
When Twain 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 Twain became familiar with the institution of slavery, a theme he later explored in his writing.
In March 1847, when Twain was 11, his father died of pneumonia.The following 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 union and educated himself in public libraries in the evenings, finding wider sources of information than he would have at a conventional school. At 22, Twain returned to Missouri. On a voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi, the steamboat pilot, Horace E. Bixby, inspired Twain to pursue a career as a steamboat pilot; it was a richly rewarding occupation with wages set at $250 per month,equivalent to $155,000 a year today.

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. Twain meticulously studied 2,000 miles (3,200 km) of the Mississippi for more than two years before he received his steamboat pilot license in 1859. While training, Samuel convinced his younger brother Henry to work with him. Henry was killed on June 21, 1858, when the steamboat he was working on, the Pennsylvania, exploded. Twain had foreseen this death in a detailed dream a month earlier,which inspired his interest in parapsychology; he was an early member of the Society for Psychical Research Twain was guilt-stricken over his brother's death and held himself responsible for the rest of his life. However, he continued to work on the river and served as a river pilot until the American Civil War broke out in 1861 and traffic along the Mississippi was curtailed.

Travels and family
Missouri was a slave state and considered by many to be part of the South, but it did not join the Confederacy. When the war began, Twain and his friends formed a Confederate militia (depicted in an 1885 short story, "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed"), which drilled for only two weeks before disbanding. Twain joined his brother, Orion, who had been appointed secretary to the territorial governor of Nevada, James W. Nye, and headed west.

1874 engraving of Twain
Twain and his brother traveled for more than two weeks on a stagecoach across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, visiting the Mormon community in Salt Lake City along the way. These experiences became the basis of the book Roughing It, and provided material for The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. Twain's journey ended in the silver-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, where he became a miner. Twain failed as a miner and found work at a Virginia City newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise On February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous travel account "LETTER FROM CARSON - re: Joe Goodman; party at Gov. Johnson's; music" with "Mark Twain".Twain then traveled to San Francisco, California, where he continued as a journalist and began lecturing. He met other writers such as Bret Harte, Artemus Ward and Dan DeQuille. An assignment in Hawaii became the basis for his first lectures In 1867, a local newspaper funded a trip to the Mediterranean. During his tour of Europe and the Middle East, he wrote a popular collection of travel letters which were compiled as The Innocents Abroad in 1869.
Twain met Charles Langdon, who showed him a picture of his sister Olivia; Twain claimed to have fallen in love at first sight. They met in 1868, were engaged a year later, and married in February 1870 in Elmira, New YorkShe came from a "wealthy but liberal family", and through her he met abolitionists, "socialists, principled atheists and activists for women’s rights and social equality", including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass and the utopian socialist William Dean Howells.
The couple lived in Buffalo, New York from 1869 to 1871. Twain owned a stake in the Buffalo Express, and worked as an editor and writer. Their son Langdon died of diphtheria at 19 months.
In 1871T,wain moved his family to Hartford, Connecticut, where starting in 1873 he arranged the building of a dramatic house for them, which local admirers saved from demolition in 1927 and eventually turned into a museum focused on him. There Olivia gave birth to three daughters: Susy (1872-1896), Clara (1874-1962), and Jean (1880-1909). The couple's marriage lasted 34 years, until Olivia's death in 1904.
During his years in Hartford, Twain became friends with fellow author William Dean Howells.

Later life and death

Mark Twain in his gown (scarlet with grey sleeves and facings) for his DLitt degree, awarded to him by Oxford University.
Twain made a second tour of Europe, described in the 1880 book, A Tramp Abroad. His tour included a visit to London where, in the summer of 1900, he was the guest of newspaper proprietor Hugh Gilzean-Reid at Dollis Hill House. Twain wrote of Dollis Hill that he had "never seen any place that was so satisfactorily situated, with its noble trees and stretch of country, and everything that went to make life delightful, and all within a biscuit's throw of the metropolis of the world." He returned to America in 1900, having earned enough to pay off his debts.
In 1906, Twain began his autobiography in the North American Review. Oxford University awarded him a Doctorate in Letters a year later.
Twain outlived Jean and Susy. He passed through a period of deep depression, which began in 1896 when his favorite daughter Susy died of meningitis. Olivia's death in 1904 and Jean's death on December 24, 1909, deepened his gloom.In 1909, Twain is quoted as saying:
I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'
His prediction was accurate—Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut, one day after the comet's closest approach to Earth (see Halley's Comet, 1835 entry).
In the New York Journal, in 1897, Twain said "The report of my death was an exaggeration."
Upon hearing of Twain's death, President Taft said:“Mark Twain gave pleasure—real intellectual enjoyment—to millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasure to millions yet to come... His humor was American, but he was nearly as much appreciated by Englishmen and people of other countries as by his own countrymen. He has made an enduring part of American literature.''
Mark Twain is buried in his wife's family plot in New york.