Home / About the Site / Contents / New / Creating Your Own Classic /Authors / Timeline / Tours / Interact! / Search / Children's Corner

Mark Twain

Mark Twain Home / MT Biography / MT Works / MT Related Links

  Samuel Longhorne Clemens was born November 30, 1835 to John and Jane Clemens, in Florida, Missouri. He was the sixth child to be born in the Clemens family. In 1839, the Clemens moved to Hannibal, Missouri, and this is where Samuel spent most of his childhood. Hannibal was located directly on the Mississippi River, and steamboats docked at Hannibal three times a day. Samuel's dream as a child was to be a worker on a steamboat.

  In 1847, John Clemens died. A year after that, Samuel began his newspaper career. He was apprenticed to a printer, Joseph Ament, at the Missouri Courier. In 1851, Samuel began working for his brother Orion, at the Hannibal Western Union. It was in this paper, at the age of 16, Samuel published his first sketches. He also worked as a printer. He worked for the Hannibal Western Union for two years, and even took over as editor a few times in his brother's absence. In 1852, several of his sketches were published in Philadephia's Saturday Evening Post.

  In 1853, Samuel left Hannibal, at the age of 18, and worked as a printer in New York and Philadephia for a year. During this time he also published several letters about his travels in the Hannibal Journal. He returned to the Midwest in 1854, and lived in several cities along the Mississippi River. In 1857, he met Horace Bixby, a steamboat captain, in New Orleans, and persuaded him to teach him how to navigate along the Mississippi, for a fee of $500. He lived on the Mississippi for two years, as a steamboat cub pilot. In 1859, Samuel received his steamboat pilot's license. However, in 1861, with the start of the Civil War, all river traffic on the Mississippi was stopped and Samuel's steamboat pilot career ended.

  Samuel joined a volunteer militia group called the Marion Rangers, but it didn't last long-the group was disbanded within two weeks. So in the summer of 1861, Samuel went with his brother, Orion, to the Nevada Territory, in a stagecoach. Orion had been appointed secretary of the new territory by President Lincoln and Samuel went to work for him. Almost immediately after their arrival, Samuel became involved in mining. He tried his luck at some of the so-called most promising prospecting regions, like Aurora and Esmeralda. However, Samuel failed to make a fortune at mining, so he went to work at a quartz mill.

  In late 1862, Samuel accepted a job at the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, which was the biggest newspaper in the Nevada Territory. He had been submitting various pieces to the paper throughout his stay in the territory but now he was to be a reporter, and he earned $25 a week. As a reporter, he covered the news of the territorial legislature and other local news. He also continued to submit humorous pieces. It was for this newspaper that he began to sign his work "Mark Twain," which was the term for two fathoms-twelve feet on the Mississippi. In 1864, Twain moved to San Francisco, because, as rumor has it, he had challenged a rival editor to a fight and had to avoid the anti-dueling laws of the Nevada Territory. In San Francisco he worked as a full time reporter for The Call, a local paper. After that, he became the Pacific correspondent of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. For the next four years, Twain worked in San Francisco. He wrote for the Golden Era, The Californian, and several other periodicals. In 1866, he took a four-month trip to Hawaii as a correspondent for the Sacramento Union. On his return, he went on a two-month lecture tour of northern California, because his letters about the "Sandwich Islands" were so popular.

  At the end of 1886, Twain left California for New York City. Here he performed his Sandwich Island lecture at New York City's largest hall-Cooper Union. He also took his lecture tour through Missouri and Iowa, and even stopped in Hannibal. Next, Twain got the job of being a correspondent for the San Francisco Alta California aboard the Quaker City-a ship bound for Europe, Russia and the Middle East. His letters from this trip were even more popular than the letters from Hawaii. Upon his return to America, Twain was offered a position as secretary to Senator William M. Stewart, in Washington D.C. He accepted the position in 1868. Also during this year, he met Olivia (nicknamed Livy) Langdon, the older sister of a friend from the Quaker City. They started courting and were secretly engaged. Over the next two years, Twain traveled on his lecture tours around the Midwest and East, published Innocents Abroad, the experience of his trip aboard the Quaker City, and continued writing sketches.

  In 1870, Mark Twain and Olivia Langdon were married-she was 25, and he was 35. They settled down in a house in Buffalo, NY, where Twain worked as an editor at the Buffalo Express. He also wrote a column for The Galaxy, a literary magazine. Unfortunately, the Clemens experienced a series of tragedies during this time-Livy's father died, then a close friend of theirs died while staying with them, and finally their first son, Langdon, was born premature. He died only two years later. In 1872, Roughing It was published and their second child, Susy, was born. In 1874, Clara, their second daughter was born, followed by Jean, their third daughter, in 1880. During this time, Twain became a family man and wrote his most famous works- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in 1876, The Prince and the Pauper in 1882, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in 1884, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in 1889.

  Due to poor financial investments and a costly social life in Hartford, CT, Twain took the family off to Europe to live and throughout most of the decade, the Clemens lived at different addresses in France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. In 1895 and 1896, the family took off for an around-the-world lecture tour. However, during the tour, Susy, the oldest Clemens child, died, in 1896. In 1898, Twain managed to pay back all his debts and the Clemens family moved back to New York City in 1900. Twain received an honorary degree from Yale in 1901, and another one from the University of Missouri in 1902. Sadly, after this, Livy Clemens became seriously ill and spent long periods of time in Maine, then in Florence, Italy, trying to recover. Twain and Livy were apart for most of this time and finally Livy died in Florence in 1904.

  Twain continued writing and moved to his final residence, a house he called Stormfield, in Redding, CT, in 1908. Another tragedy occurred in 1909, when Twain's youngest daughter, Jean, died. After Jean's death, Twain's health deteriorated. He fell into a coma on April 21, 1910 at Stormfield, and died soon after, at the age of 74. He was buried next to his wife and children at Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, NY.

Home / About the Site / Contents / New / Creating Your Own Classic /Authors / Timeline / Tours / Interact! / Search / Children's Corner