| Mark Twain |
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Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835. He was an American writer, better known by his pen name Mark Twain. He is mostly famous for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), called "the Great American Novel", and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). When he was four, Twain's family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a port town on the Mississippi River and in 1847, when Twain was 11, his father died of pneumonia. So, the next year Twain left school after the fifth grade to become a printer's apprentice. In 1851, he began working as a typesetter for a local newspaper. When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. He educated himself in public libraries in the evenings, finding more information than at a school. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to Nevada where he became a gold miner. Twain failed as a miner and worked at a Virginia City newspaper as a journalist. While a reporter, he wrote a humorous story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," which was very popular. So, Twain started writing books based on his travelling and life experiences. He had great success as a writer and as a public speaker, too. Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut, after having lived an adventurous life. |
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