TWAIN, MARK, the of SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS (1835-191o), American novelist and humorist, born at Florida (Mo.), Nov. 30, 1835. His father, a happy-go-lucky storekeeper and lawyer from Tennessee, popularly known as "Judge" Clemens, moved when the boy was four years old to Hannibal (Mo.), dying eight years later and leaving the family all but destitute. Little Sam had virtually no formal education, but his imagination was early stored with the lore of the Mis sissippi river and the negroes who peopled the neighbourhood. As his brother's assistant on the Hannibal Journal he learned type-setting and became a journeyman printer, travelling as far eastward as New York and Philadelphia before he was 19. Drawn back to the Mississippi by the "permanent ambition" of his boy hood to become a pilot, he set to work "learning the river," getting "personally and familiarly acquainted," as he says in Life on the Mississippi, "with all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography or history." At the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, the river trade came to an end, and young Clemens soon set out for the West with his brother Orion, who had just been appointed lieutenant governor of Nevada. There, in the neighbourhood of Carson City, he had a most hilarious but equally unlucrative experience as a gold miner, the record of which he has left in Roughing It. Soon he turned to journalism on the Virginia City Enterprise, adopting the nom de plume "Mark Twain," a call used by Mississippi pilots in taking soundings on the river. Moving to San Francisco, he became a member of the witty group that gathered about the Golden Era and included Artemus Ward, Charles Warren Stoddard, Bret Harte and Orpheus C. Ker, and with the publication of The Cele brated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County found himself famous overnight. On the wave of this notoriety he went to New York, where he delivered his "serio-humorous" lecture on the Sandwich Islands. In June, 1867, on a commission to contribute letters to the San Francisco Alta California, he joined the party embarking on the steamship "Quaker City" for the tour of the Mediterranean described in The Innocents Abroad. With the wide publication of these letters, Mark Twain became the most extensively read author in America. In 187o, he married Olivia L. Langdon and moved to Hartford, which became his home for the next 30 years.
He settled down at once to the trade of authorship, publishing Roughing It in 1872, collaborating in 1874 with Charles Dudley Warner in The Gilded Age, his sole novel of contemporary man ners which contained the famous character portrait, Colonel Sellers, and writing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1875). In 188o he visited Europe a second time, recording his experiences humorously in A Tramp Abroad. In 1882 he published his ro mance for children, The Prince and the Pauper, which was fol lowed in successive years by Life on the Mississippi and his mas terpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a sequel to Tom Sawyer. He became a partner of Charles L. Webster and Com pany which reaped immense profits from the Memoirs of General Grant, the Life of Pope Leo XIII., but this firm failed and left him with heavy debts. Meanwhile he had iyublished A Con necticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889) and The American Claimant (1892), which were followed in 1894 by The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, a story set in the Mississippi valley and containing much of the cynical philosophy that had become char acteristic of its author.
In 1891 Clemens went abroad again, and, after spending a winter in Berlin, settled in Florence, where he wrote his Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, a book for which, as he later de clared, he had spent 14 years in preparation, and which he pub lished anonymously, observing to his wife that it meant more to him than anything he had ever undertaken, and that it would never be accepted seriously over his own signature. After spend ing two years at home, he set out, with the purpose of earning money to pay off his debts, on the journey round the world recorded in Following the Equator, lecturing on the way in Aus tralia and India. Returning home in 1900, he settled in New York, and during this year a collected edition of his works in 22 volumes was issued by the American Publishing Company of Hartford. He had published in 1897 a volume of miscellaneous essays entitled How to Tell a Story; and his further works in cluded The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg (19oo), The Double Barrelled Detective Story (1902), Adam's Diary (1904), What is Man? (privately printed, 1906), Christian Science (1907), Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (1907) and Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909).