Biography
Samuel Clemens, also known as Mark Twain, is one of the great American writers. Mark Twain was born in Florida, Missouri on November 30, 1835 and died in 1910 in Reading Connecticut (Mtwain 1). He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri near the Mississippi River. When Mark Twain was a child he played along the Mississippi River and like in his tail of Huckleberry Finn, made rafts to ride on and swam in the river. When he was only twelve years old his father died, and Twain had “to drop out of school and become an apprentice typesetter for local newspapers” (Clemens 1). He ended up eventually working for his brother, who owned many newspapers. After years of working with his brother, Twain left and began to travel and write about what he saw on his travels, which were published in his brother’s newspapers. From his travels, Twain was inspired to write some of his best works, so he continued this for years (Clemens 1). Mark Twain had also joined the Confederate Army during the Civil War and worked his way to become a second lieutenant (Clemens 6).
Mark Twain eventually met a young wealthy woman named Olivia Langdon, who he married, and had four children with (Clemens 6). Twain and his wife resided in Hartford, Connecticut for twenty years, and lived near other famous writers such as, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Charles Dudley Warner (Clemens 3). Near the end of Mark Twain’s life, his wife grew ill and died in 1904. “Despite his public acclaim, he remained mean-spirited and pessimistic” (Clemens 6). Twain’s health began to decline, and he ended up dying from heart disease in 1910.
Since Mark Twain’s death, like many writers, his fame grew and “the mass of his literary achievement has increased immensely” (Clemens 6). Some of Mark Twain’s famous novels are “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” published in 1884 and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” published in 1876, as well as, “The Prince and the Pauper” published in 1882. Some of Twain’s short stories are “Short Stories of Mark Twain” published in 1967, and “Mark Twain’s Sketches” published in 1874. (Teuber 1).
-Link to “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/Twa2Huc.html
-Link to “The Prince and the Pauper”