Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835. He was born on the Missouri frontier in a small log village called Florida. His parents had come to Florida from their former home in Tennessee (Unger 192). When Clemens was four, he moved with his family to Hannibal, Missouri, a port on the Mississippi River (Mark Twain 1). His father, who had studied law in Kentucky, was a local magistrate and small merchant (Unger 193). When Samuel was twelve, his father died. He was then apprenticed to two local printers (Unger 193). When he was sixteen, Clemens began setting type for the local newspaper Hannibal Journal, which his older brother Orion managed (Mark Twain 1).

In 1853, when Samuel was eighteen, he left Hannibal for St. Louis (Unger 194). There he became a steam boat pilot on the Mississippi River. Clemens piloted steamboats until the Civil War in 1861. Then he served briefly with the Confe

Twain wrote the sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1884. The sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is considered by many to be Twain's masterpiece (Mark Twain 1). The book is the story of Tom Sawyer's best friend, Huck. He flees his father, the town drunk, by raft down the Mississippi River with a runaway slave, Jim. The pair's adventures show Huck and the reader the cruelty of which men and women are capable. Another theme of the novel is the conflict between Huck's feelings of friendship with Jim, who is one of the few people he can trust, and his knowledge that he is breaking the laws of the time by helping Jim escape (Mark Twain 2). The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is almost entirely narrated from Huck's point of view, is noted for its authentic language and for its deep commitment to freedom (Marshall 232).

Kunitz, Stanley J., and Haycraft, Howard. American Authors 1600-1900: A Biographical Dictionary of American Literature. New York: H.W. Wilson Company, 1938.

In 1870 he married Olivia Langdon. After living briefly in Buffalo, New York, the couple moved to Hartford, Connecticut (Bain, Flora, and Rubin 104). Much of Mark Twain's best work was written in the 1870's and 1880's in Hartford and during the summers at Quarry Farm, near Elmira, New York (Bain Flora and Rubin 104). It was at Quarry Farm that he wrote Roughing It in 1872, which recounts his early adventures as a miner and journalist.

In Mark Twain's later years he wrote less, but he became a celebrity,

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