Mark Twain 4
Mark Twain is important to American literature because of his novels and how they portray the American experience. Some of his best selling novels were Innocents Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In these books, Mark Twain recalls his own adventures of steamboating on the Mississippi River. Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835 in a small village of Florida, Missouri. His parent's names were John Marshall Clemens and Jan Lampton Clemens, descendants of slaves in Virginia. They had been married in Kentucky and move to Tennessee and then Missouri. When Sam was four, his father, who was full of the grandiose ideas of making a fortune, moved the family to Hannibal, Missouri. Here, the mighty Mississippi River with its mile side wide was the home of little Samuel Clemens. There on the West Bank of the river, Sam spent his boyhood with moving steamboats and making stops (Encyclopedia Americana 921A). Growing up aside a mile-wide surfaced Mississippi River was the same as Tom Sawyer did. Young Samuel must have watched, as any boy might, admire the strength of this river and the surrounding frontier. He seen men killed in waterfront brawls and Negroes that wer
Publication Data, New York 1985. "When the war closed the river and after two hectic weeks in the Confederate Army, he went to Nevada with his brother, an abolitionist whom President Lincoln had appointed secretary to the territorial governor. And so, while the Civil War raged in the East, Samuel Clemens found himself searching the Wet for silver, and, soon his father, dreaming of a fortune (American Writers 193). Since Samuel's career as a prospector and a minor was a failure, he went back solely on journalism as a profession. In 1862, he got a secured job with the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. This demonstrated his ability as a reporter and a humorist. "A year later, in February 1863, he adopted the pseudonym "Mark Twain" a river phrase meaning "two fathoms deep" (Encyclopedia Americana 291A). By the time he was 18, Sam had served an apprentices as a printer on his brother's Orion's paper and had tried his hand at writing juvenile sarcasm. He even had one humorous sketch, The Dandy Frightening the Squatter, published in B. P. Shillaber's Carpet Bag, which was a New York periodical. During the next 10 years, from1853 to 1862, he continued his efforts as a humorous writer. During those ten years Sam also engaged in another skill. He was piloting steamboats on the Mississippi River. He might have remained a pilot had not the Civil War intruded (Encyclopedia Americana 192A). Meltzer, Milton. Mark Twain A Writer's Life Library of Congress Cataloging in He started to use the pen name Mark Twain while he was on the Enterprise. Changing names during this time was common for writers. "When readers saw that na
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1110
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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