Mark Twain
1835–1910

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (‘Mark Twain’), was born in Florida, Missouri on 30 November 1835. A printer first, and afterwards a Mississippi pilot, he adopted his pseudonym from a well-known call of the man sounding the river in shallow places (Mark Twain meaning ‘by the mark two fathoms’). In 1861 he tried silver-mining in Nevada; next edited for two years the Virginia City Enterprise; in 1864 moved to San Francisco. In 1867 he visited France, Italy and Palestine, gathering material for his Innocents Abroad (1869), which established his reputation as a humorist. He was afterwards an editor at Buffalo, New York, where he married Miss Langdon, a lady of wealth. Later he removed to Hartford, Connecticut and joined a publishing firm which failed, but largely recouped his losses by lecturing and writing. He died on 21 April 1910. Among his books are Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn, More Tramps Abroad, What is Man (1910).