biography
| name: |
Twain, Mark
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pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1835–1910)
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| biography:
| Writer, journalist, and lecturer, born in Florida, Missouri, USA. A printer (1847–57) and later a Mississippi river-boat pilot (1857–61), he adopted his name from a well-known call used when sounding the river shallows (‘Mark twain!’ meaning ‘by the mark two fathoms’). He edited for two years the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, and in 1864 moved to San Francisco as a reporter. In 1867 he visited France, Italy, and Palestine, gathering material for his The Innocents Abroad (1869), which established his reputation as a humorist. On his return to America, he settled in the East, and in 1870 married Olivia Langdon (d.1904), the daughter of a wealthy New York coal merchant. In 1871 they moved to Hartford, CT, where they built a distinctive house (now open to the public) at the centre of a community of artists, known as Nook Farm. His two greatest masterpieces, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), drawn from his own boyhood experiences, are firmly established among the world's classics; other favourites are A Tramp Abroad (1880) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). Widely known as a lecturer, he developed a great popular following. Financial speculations led to the loss of most of his earnings by 1894, and he embarked on a world lecture tour to restore some of his wealth. In his later years, he was greatly honoured (especially in England), but following the death of his wife and of two of his daughters, his writing took on a darker, pessimistic character, as seen in his autobiography (1924). |
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