Bio

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, in the "almost invisible" village of Florida, Missouri. His family soon moved to Hannibal, on the west bank of the Mississippi, where he attended "the ordinary western common school" until he was twelve, the last of his formal schooling. He became a typesetter and began work on his brother's Hannibal newspaper, publishing his first humorous sketch in 1851. In the next fifteen years he was successively a steamboat pilot, a soldier for three weeks, a silver miner, a newspaper reporter and a bohemian in San Francisco known as "Mark Twain." At no time during these years did he seriously entertain a career in literature. But in 1865, deeply in debt, he acknowledged a talent for "literature, of a low order-i.e. humorous," and turned his attention to "seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God's creatures." In the next forty years, he published more than a dozen books and hundreds of shorter works, including his masterpiece in 1885, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. By that time he had utterly transformed the way the world regarded "literature of a low order." Seven years before Clemens died in 1910, Rudyard Kipling told the publisher, Frank Doubleday: "He is the biggest man you have on your side of the water by a damn sight, and don't you forget it."