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Samuel Langhorne Clemens, third of five children, was born in Florida, Missouri on November 30, 1835. He grew up in the town of Hannibal, Missouri, a large river town. It is around the town of Hannibal that Samuel Clemens' 2 most famous characters come alive—Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. These two live out their adventurous summers along the river of Hannibal.
Samuel’s father was a lawyer and storekeeper, respected in the community but unsuccessful at business. It was not because of his lack of desire, Samuel's father was a very ambitious man but life dealt him a short hand. Samuel's father died when Samuel was 12 years old. This caused Samuel to take on the task of working to support himself and the rest of his family.
Samuel Clemens became apprenticed to a printer shortly after his father’s death and soon after this, his brother Orion began working as a publisher in Hannibal and Samuel went to work for him. At the age of 18, Samuel began a three-year phase of travel. His journeys took him to St. Louis, Philadelphia, New York, Keokuk, Iowa and Cincinnati, Ohio. While in each of these cities Samuel worked as a printer to earn his living.
In 1856, Samuel headed out by steamboat for New Orleans. Samuel's intentions were to head to the Amazon. He thought he would find wealth and fame there as well as adventure. He never made it to the Amazon on this trip, however he did apprentice himself to Horace Bixby, the pilot of the Mississippi riverboat he was traveling on. Samuel trained for 18 months and continued in this prestigious trade until the Civil War in 1861 closed down the river traffic.
Samuel began to write under the pseudonym of Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass publishing three humorous articles about his behavior at the Keokuk Saturday Post. The articles that he wrote were the start of a pattern of writing or nomadic journalism, which would mold the next ten years of young Samuel's life.
Samuel spent some time with the Confederate militia and then journeyed with his brother, Orion to the Nevada territory. Samuel’s brother was appointed by President Lincoln to be the secretary for the territorial government. Ten years after this “Roughing It” was published. In this story, Samuel Clemens told of the adventures the two of them shared on the way to Carson City. He told wrote about the various schemes to get rich quick all of which, of course, failed. Samuel Clemens gleaned some very important things from these years, his writing improved and he was writing again for newspapers. It was also during this time that he took on the name Mark Twain. Mark Twain is a term from his days as a riverboat pilot. It means safe water or two fathoms deep.
Samuel Clemens, now Mark Twain, was beginning to gain recognition as a lecturer and had his greatest recognition with his performance of the well-known tale, “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” which was first published in 1865. The first book published for Twain, which is still one of his most popular, is “Innocents Abroad”, published in 1869. This book consists mainly of letters that Twain wrote for the Alta California and New York Tribune during his excursion to the Mediterranean and Holy Land in 1867. These letters were not only funny but also satirical of the Old World developing into the young country about ready to explode with growth and political platforms.
Twain soon won the hand of Olivia Langdon, daughter of a wealthy man from Elmira, New York. His marriage helped to give him focus, his writings became more serious, beginning with “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” “Old Times on the Mississippi”, and then “Life on the Mississippi", which was a compilation of works from the two published in journals. The “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" took Twain 8 years to write and many other works would follow but none were to have the impact of the Mississippi life works.
Twain’s magical touch with words gave the literary community a tremendous wealth of literature. Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, was a common man and he spoke for the common people in all of his works. Samuel Clemens died in 1910.
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