"Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri. Before his birth John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton, his parents, of Virginia stock, had made four moves westward. In 1839 the family moved again, this time eastward to Hannibal, Missouri. Hannibal was a frontier town of less than 500 inhabitants. Small as it was, the town offered much valuable material for a budding writer. The inhabitants, a large share of whom Samuel came to know well, ranged on the social scale from poor whites and slaves to the group Huck Finn called "quality folks." It was a market town, visited periodically by farmers from the surrounding countryside. It was also a river town, invaded by all sorts of travelers moving upstream and downstream--steamboat men, revivalists, circus performers, minstrel companies, showboat actors. It was not strange, therefore, that Hannibal and the people encountered there were destined to figure in many of Clemens' books--were, in fact, to provide his richest source of literary material. During vacations for several years young Samuel frequently visited the farm of his uncle, John A. Quarles, not far from Florida. The farm also figured in a number of books. Shortly after the death of his father in 1847, Samuel ended his brief period of schooling to become a printer's apprentice. Like many nineteenth century authors, he was prepared for his later career--as a writer by work as a typesetter and by miscellaneous reading. His earliest writings were skits for his brother Orion's Hannibal newspaper and a sketch, "The Dandy Frightening the Squatter," published in The Carpet Bag (Boston) in 1852, his first published story of life on the Mississippi River.Between 1853 and 1857 Clemens worked as a journeyman printer in St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Muscatine and Keokuk, Iowa, and in Cincinnati. A letter written to a sweetheart at the time he worked in Keokuk showed more clearly than anything else he wrote in this period his skill in imaginative humor. A series of sketches, "The Snodgrass Letters," signed with the pseudonym Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, were published in the Keokuk Post in 1856 and 1857. These showed that Clemens, like many other humorists of the 1850s, was fond of using misspellings, puns, and weirdly fashioned sentences for humorous effects. The trip during which he wrote these letters eventually carried him to the Mississippi River. There he took a downstream boat, apparently with the intention of going to South America to seek his fortune. During the trip, however, he recalled boyhood memories of the glamour of river life and arranged to become a pilot's apprentice under Horace Bixby. He won his license in due time and served as a pilot until, in 1861, the Civil War interrupted river traffic. While a steamboat man, he furthered his literary development by writing occasional skits for newspapers. After serving briefly in the Confederate army, he journeyed overland to Carson City, Nevada, with his brother Orion, who had a political appointment in the territorial government. In Nevada Clemens was caught up for a time in the speculative fever of the mining country; his letters home were full of accounts of investments and prospecting trips. When none of his ventures turned out well, he became a reporter on the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, beginning in 1862. It was while working on this paper that he really found himself as a humorist, realizing that his sporadic journalistic activities had been no more than amateurish exercises preparing him for real achievements. In 1863, while reporting on meetings of the Nevada legislature, he first used the pseudonym Mark Twain, derived from a call by Mississippi boatmen sounding the depth of the river. In 1864 he went to San Francisco, where he worked for several newspapers. A few of his sketches were reprinted in eastern publications. One story, "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," published in the New York Saturday Press, November 18, 1865, was a national sensation. The next year a trip to the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands yielded not only a series of humorous travel letters to the Sacramento Union but also a serious article published in Harper's Magazine. Furthermore, upon returning from this voyage, he launched a career on the West Coast as a humorous lecturer that continued until 1906. In 1866 Twain became a traveling correspondent of the Alta California. A number of letters he wrote for that newspaper told the details of a journey eastward by boat; another series of 17 letters told of his visits to New York and the Middle West in 1867. A letter of June 23 told of his spending a night in a station house in New York, charged with disorderly conduct. Others told of visits to art galleries, theaters, museums, and churches in New York and of brief stays with his family. The year 1867 saw the publication of Mark Twain's first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveros County, a collection of sketches; it was, too, his first appearance as a humorous lecturer in the East. The year was also notable for his trip to the Holy Land with an excursion party, reported in letters published in the Alta California and the New York Tribune. These letters, collected and revised, were published as the volume Innocents Abroad (1869), a book which secured his fame as a humorist.Clemens became part owner of the Buffalo Express in 1869, married Olivia Langdon of Elmira, New York in 1870, and served for a time as a newspaper editor in Buffalo and a column conductor in the Galaxy. He soon severed his connections with the newspaper and the magazine, moved to Hartford, and devoted all his time to writing and lecturing. A number of books reaped handsome royalties, notably Roughing It (1872), based on his experiences in the Far West; The Gilded Age (1873), written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner as an expose of the speculative and corrupt spirit of the period; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876); Life on the Mississippi (1883); The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); Pudd'nhead Wilson (1884), which told of Hannibal and the river life he had known in youth; The Prince and the Pauper (1882) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), the first of which dealt seriously and the second humorously with historical materials; and A Tramp Abroad (1880), a travel book.Despite the remarkable financial success of these books, Clemens found himself bankrupt by 1894. He had lived lavishly and had made a number of disastrous investments. Declared insolvent, Clemens nevertheless promised to pay his creditors dollar for dollar. A lecture tour around the world and the publication of two books, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896) and Following the Equator (1897), helped to fulfill his promise. His bankruptcy, however, and the death of his daughter Susan in 1896 and his wife in 1904 did much to develop Twain's pessimism, which had found some expression as early as 1883 but which grew increasingly bitter with the passing years. His agnostic philosophy found its best and most complete expression in The Mysterious Stranger, a misanthropic fantasy written in 1898 but not published until 1906.Although Clemens had at first been considered merely an amusing professional funny man, during his last years he was placed by many among the great fiction writers. Yale and Oxford gave him honorary degrees and leading critics, William Dean Howells for one, hailed him as a genius. Practically all his writings have in them much of the native humor he acquired on the Missouri frontier of his boyhood, on the river of his pilot days, and on the far western frontier. His best books are generally recognized as masterly re-creations of American life in the period of his boyhood and his young manhood.
"(http://www.robinsonresearch.com/LITERATE/AUTHORS/Twain.htm)
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