Mark Twain
1835–1910 12 entries
Biography
Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was an American writer and humorist, whom William Faulkner called the father of American literature. He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, the river that runs through his best books. He worked as a printer, a steamboat pilot, a gold prospector and a newspaper reporter, and he took his pen name from the boatmen’s call for a depth of two fathoms. A comic tale about a jumping frog made him known in 1865, and his travel book The Innocents Abroad made him famous.
His novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn draw on his boyhood by the river, and Huckleberry Finn is counted among the great American novels. He was a sought-after lecturer, a sharp critic of hypocrisy and imperialism, and one of the most quoted people of his time. Born in the year Halley’s Comet appeared, he predicted that he would go out with it, and he died in 1910, the day after the comet’s closest approach to the Sun.