Samuel Clemens
Mark Twain was one of the famous American authours.
He was born in the year 1835 in Florida, Missouri. His real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. His birth place was a small town which was sufficient material for a budding writer.
His father died during the year 1847 and shortly after the death of his father his went for schooling to become a printer's apprentice.
Between 1853 and 1857 he worked as a journeyman printer. A series of sketches, "The Snodgrass Letters," signed with the pseudonym Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, were published in the Keokuk Post in 1856 and 1857. These showed that Clemens, like many other humorists of the 1850s, was fond of using misspellings, and puns for humorous effects. The trip during which he wrote these letters eventually carried him to the Mississippi River.
There he took a downstream boat, apparently with the intention of going to South America to seek his fortune. During the trip, however, he recalled boyhood memories of the glamour of river life and arranged to become a pilot's apprentice under Horace Bixby. He won his license in due time and served as a pilot until, in 1861, the Civil War interrupted river traffic. While a steamboat man, he furthered his literary development by writing occasional skits for newspapers. After serving briefly in the Confederate army, he journeyed overland to Carson City, Nevada, with his brother Orion, who had a political appointment in the territorial government.
In Nevada Clemens was caught up for a time in the speculative fever of the mining country; his letters home were full of accounts of investments and prospecting trips. When none of his ventures turned out well, he became a reporter on the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, beginning in 1862. It was while working on this paper that he really found himself as a humorist, realizing that his sporadic journalistic activities had been no more than amateurish exercises preparing him for real achievements. In 1863, while reporting on meetings of the Nevada legislature, he first used the pseudonym Mark Twain, derived from a call by Mississippi boatmen sounding the depth of the river. In 1864 he went to San Francisco, where he worked for several newspapers. A few of his sketches were reprinted in eastern publications. One story, "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," published in the New York Saturday Press, November 18, 1865, was a national sensation. The next year a trip to the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands yielded not only a series of humorous travel letters to the Sacramento Union but also a serious article published in Harper's Magazine. Furthermore, upon returning from this voyage, he launched a career on the West Coast as a humorous lecturer that continued until 1906.
In 1866 Twain became a traveling correspondent of the Alta California. A number of letters he wrote for that newspaper told the details of a journey eastward by boat; another series of 17 letters told of his visits to New York and the Middle West in 1867. A letter of June 23 told of his spending a night in a station house in New York, charged with disorderly conduct. Others told of visits to art galleries, theaters, museums, and churches in New York and of brief stays with his family. The year 1867 saw the publication of Mark Twain's first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveros County, a collection of sketches; it was, too, his first appearance as a humorous lecturer in the East. The year was also notable for his trip to the Holy Land with an excursion party, reported in letters published in the Alta California and the New York Tribune. These letters, collected and revised, were published as the volume Innocents Abroad (1869), a book which secured his fame as a humorist.
Despite the remarkable financial success of these books, Clemens found himself bankrupt by 1894. He had lived lavishly and had made a number of disastrous investments. Declared insolvent, Clemens nevertheless promised to pay his creditors dollar for dollar. A lecture tour around the world and the publication of two books, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896) and Following the Equator (1897), helped to fulfill his promise. His bankruptcy, however, and the death of his daughter Susan in 1896 and his wife in 1904 did much to develop Twain's pessimism, which had found some expression as early as 1883 but which grew increasingly bitter with the passing years.
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