At his peak, he was probably a virtually all popular Our contries celebrity of his instance. William Faulkner wrote he was "the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs." Clemens maintained that a title "Mark Twain" come from either his years on the riverboat, in which 2 fathoms (12 foot or even Triad.Vii m), or even "safe water", was marked by calling "mark twain". However these are typically thought that a title actually come from either his wilder times in a West, in which he would purchase deuce drinks & tell the bartender to "mark twain" in his tab. Trueness origin is unknown. Additionally to Mark Twain, Clemens utilized a anonym "Sieur Louis de Conte". (Thomas more under "Pen names," in the image below.)

Early life
Samuel Clemens was innate November 30, 1835 inside Florida, Missouri, the third of four living youngsters of John & Jane Clemens.

When he was however a diaper wearing, the personal moved to the flow of any stream town of Hannibal, Missouri, hoping their fortunes would improve there. It was this town & its habitant that andy skinner Mark Twawithin late put to such ingenious have in his best known works, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).

Clemens' father died around 1847, allowing numerous debts. the oldest boy, Orion, presently began publishing a newspaper & Sam began contributing to that as a craftsman printer & occasional writer. A few of the liveliest & virtually all controversial stories around Orion's paper come from either a pen of his immature brother--ordinarily whenever Orion was away from town. Clemens likewise traveled to St. Louis and New York City to earn a living as a printer.

However a lure of the Mississippi eventually drew Clemens to a career as a steamboat pilot, a profession he late claimed would own held him to the prevent of his times, recounting his lives around his book Life on the Mississippi (1883). However a Civil War put an end to commercial steamboat traffic around 1861, & Clemens experienced to search the freshly job.

When the brief stint by having the local militia (an own household budget he recounted inside his short story, "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed" (1885), he escaped further call for using a war by running west around July of 1861 using Orion, world health organization got been appointed secretary to the territorial governor of Nevada. Them traveled for fortnight through a Plains by stage to the silver-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada.

Roughing it Out West
Couple's lives out West formed him as a writer & became a basis of his 2nd book, Roughing It. Around Nevadthe, Samuel Clemens became a mineworker, hoping to strike it rich excavate silver in the Comstock Lode and staying for long periods inside camp by using his fellow prospectors--an additional mode of residing that he down the road put to literary utilise. Failing as a mineworker, he fell into newspaper function within Virginia City for the Territorial Enterprise, where he adopted a nom de plume "Mark Twain" first. Inside 1864, he moved down to San Francisco and wrote for several papers there.

Around 1865, Duad got his number one literary profits. At a behest of humourist Artemus Ward (whom he had met & befriended around Virginia City when you took Ward's lecture tour of 1863), he submitted the humourous short story for the collection Ward was publication. A story arrived as well late for that book, however a publisher passed it to the Saturday Click. That story, originally entitled "Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog" however currently better referred to as "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," was reprinted nationwide, & known as by Atlantic Monthly editor James Russell Lowell "the finest piece of humorous literature yet produced in America."

In the spring of 1866 he was licenced per Sacramento Union newspaper to travel to the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) to write a series of letters reporting in his journey there. In his link to to San Francisco, a profits of a letters & the personalized encouragement of Colonel John McComb (publisher of San Francisco's Alta California newspaper) led him to try his h& at the lecture circuit, renting the Academy of Music and charging the dollar a head admission. "Doors open at 7 o'clock," Span wrote on the advertising poster. "The trouble to begin at 8 o'clock."

the number one lecture was a uncivilized profits, & shortly Dyad was traveling higher & down the state, lecture & entertaining packed houses.

First book
However it was an additional hike that established his fame as an creator. Brace convinced Gap. McComb of the Alta California to invite Couple's passage aboard a steam packet Quaker City in an Our contries hike to Europe and the Middle East. A ensuant letters Duet produced for a newspaper reporting on the hike formed the basis of his 1st book, The Innocents Abroad, a big & humourous travelog that pointedly failed to worship Old World arts and conventions. Sold by subscription, the book became tremendously popular & put its creator around a spotlight he never volitionally relinquished for the rest of his life.

Fallowing a profits of Inexperienced person he married Olivia Langdon around 1870 & moved to Buffalo, New York, then to Hartford, Connecticut. In the cycle of this period, he lectured typically in the United States & England.

Late he wrote as an avid critic of U.s. society. He wrote all about politics by having his Life on the Mississippi.

Pen names: Mark Twain, Sieur Louis de Conte

Andy skinner's have version of how else he took his additional illustrious pen name, Mark Twain, is, perhaps, plausible. Within chapter L of Life on the Mississippi, he says he borrowed it from either Captain Isaiah Sellers, a riverboat captain world health organization "... used to jot down brief paragraphs of plain, practical information about the river, and sign them 'MARK TWAIN,' and give them to the New Orleans Picayune...

"It therefore chanced that one of these paragraphs became a text for the number one news story. I personally burlesqued it broadly... I personally showed our performance to a select few pilots, & it thirstily rushed it into print in the 'Up to date Orleans True Delta.' It was the great pity; for it did cipher any worthy service, & it sent a pang deep into a good human's heart. There was there is no malice inside a rubbish; however it guy the captain. It poke fun the human to whom such the tool was newly & unknown & dreadful...He never printed a second paragraph when he lived, & he nevermore signed "Mark Twain" to anything. At a period that a telegraphy brought a news of his demise, I personally was on the Pacific coast. I personally was the freshly recently journalist, & required the nom de guerre; and so We confiscated a ancient tar's junked a single, & use done our better to produce it remaaround what it wwhen inside his hands—a sign & symbol & warrant that whatever is obtained within its company can becopine tree state gambled in as existence a petrified truth; how else We've succeeded, it would non be mild in me to say."

Clemens used the pseudonym "Sieur Louis de Conte" as his pen name for his fictionalized biography of Joan of Arc (1896).

Career overview
Twain's greatest contribution to American literature is generally considered to be the novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As Ernest Hemingway himself said: Also popular are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, ''A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and the non-fictional Life on the Mississippi.

Twain began as a writer of light humorous verse; he ended as a grim, almost profane chronicler of the vanities, hypocrisies and acts of killing committed by mankind. At mid-career, with Huckleberry Finn'', he combined rich humor, sturdy narrative and social criticism in a way almost unrivaled in world literature.

Twain was a master at rendering colloquial speech, and helped to create and popularize a distinctive American literature, built on American themes and language.

Twain had a fascination with science and scientific inquiry. Twain developed a close and lasting friendship with Nikola Tesla. They spent quite a bit of time together from time to time (in Tesla's laboratory, among other places). ''A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court'' featured a time traveller from the America of Twain's day who used his knowledge of science to introduce modern technology to Arthurian England. Twain also patented an improvement in adjustable and detachable straps for garments.

Twain was a major figure in the American Anti-Imperialist League, which opposed the annexation of the Philippines by the United States. He wrote "Incident in the Philippines", posthumously published in 1924, in response to the Moro Crater Massacre, in which six hundred Moros were killed.

In recent years, there have been occasional attempts to ban Huckleberry Finn from various libraries, because Twain's use of local color offends some people. Although Twain was against racism and imperialism far in front of public sentiment of his time, some with only superficial familiarity of his work have condemned it as racist for its accurate depiction of the language in common use in the United States in the 19th century. Expressions that were used casually and unselfconsciously then are often perceived today as racism (in present times, such racial epithets are far more visible and condemned). Twain himself would probably be amused by these attempts; in 1885, when a library in Massachusetts banned the book, he wrote to his publisher, "It use expelled Huckaback from either their library when 'trash suitable lone for the slum area', that may sell 25,000 copies for u.s.a. for certain."

Many of Mark Twain's works have been suppressed at times for one reason or another. 1880 saw the publication of an anonymous slim volume entitled 1601: Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors. Twain was among those rumored to be the author, but the issue was not settled until 1906, when Twain acknowledged his literary paternity of this scatological masterpiece.

Twain at least saw 1601 published during his lifetime. Twain wrote an anti-war article entitled The War Prayer during the Spanish-American War. It was submitted for publication, but on March 22, 1905, Harper's Bazaar rejected it as "not quite suited to a woman's magazine." Eight days later, Twain wrote to his friend Dan Beard, to whom he had read the story, "I don't think the prayer will be published in my time. None however a dead come permitted to tell a truth." Because he had an exclusive contract with Harper & Brothers, Mark Twain could not publish "The War Prayer" elsewhere and it remained unpublished until 1923.

In his later life Twain's family suppressed some of his work which was especially irreverent toward conventional religion, notably Letters from the Earth, which was not published until 1962. The anti-religious The Mysterious Stranger was published in 1916.

Perhaps most controversial of all was Mark Twain's 1879 humorous talk at the Stomach Club in Paris entitled Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism (masturbation), which concluded with the thought "If you must gamble the endures sexually, don't play a single hand bay." This talk was not published until 1943, and then only in a limited edition of fifty copies.

Later life and friendship with Henry H. Rogers
Twain's fortunes then began to decline; in his later life, Twain was a very depressed man, but still capable. Following the erroneous publication of a premature obituary in the New York Journal, Twain famously responded: "A reports of our demise come greatly exaggerated" (June 2nd 1897).

He lost 3 out of 4 of his children, and his beloved wife, Olivia Langdon, before his death in 1910. He also had some very bad times with his businesses. His publishing company ended up going bankrupt, and he lost thousands of dollars on one typesetting machine that was never finished. He also lost a great deal of revenue on royalties from his books being plagiarized before he even had a chance to publish them himself.

In 1893, Twain was introduced to industrialist and financier Henry H. Rogers, one of the principals of Standard Oil. Rogers reorganized Twain's tangled finances, and the two became close friends for the rest of their lives. Rogers' family became Twain's surrogate family and he was a frequent guest at the Rogers townhouse in New York City and summer home in Fairhaven, Massachusetts. They were drinking and poker buddies. In 1907, they traveled together in Rogers' yacht Kanawha to the Jamestown Exposition held at Sewell's Point near Norfolk, Virginia in celebration of the 300th anniversary of the founding of the Jamestown Colony.

While Twain openly credited Rogers with saving him from financial ruin, there is also substantial evidence in their published correspondence that the close friendship in their later years was mutually beneficial, apparently softening at least somewhat the hard-driving industrialist Rogers, who had apparently earned the nickname "Hell Fox Rogers" when helping build Standard Oil earlier in his career. In one of history's ironies, Rogers was introduced by Twain to investigative journalist Ida Tarbell, who is widely credited with exposing the dark side of Standard Oil, and did so largely through information she obtained through meetings with Rogers. During the years of their friendship, influenced by Twain, Rogers helped finance the education of Helen Keller and made substantial contributions to Dr. Booker T. Washington. After Rogers' death, Dr. Washington revealed that Rogers (with a much-hated public persona) had been generously funding many small country schools and institutions of higher education in the South for the betterment and education of African Americans for over 15 years.

Although by this late date he was in marginal health, in April, 1909, Twain returned to Norfolk with Rogers, and was a guest speaker at the dedication dinner held for the newly completed Virginian Railway, a "Mountains to Sea" engineering marvel of the day. The construction of the new railroad had been solely financed by industrialist Rogers.

When Rogers died suddenly in New York less than two months later. Twain, on his way by train from Connecticut to visit Rogers, was met with the news at Grand Central Station the same morning by his daughter. His grief-stricken reaction was widely reported. He served as one of the pall-bearers at the Rogers funeral in New York later that week. When he declined to ride the funeral train from New York on to Fairhaven, Massachusetts for the internment, he stated that he could not undertake to travel that distance among those whom he knew so well, and with whom he must of necessity join in conversation.

Twain himself died less than one year later. He wrote in 1909, "I personally come within by owning Halley's Comet in 1835. These are coming over again next season, & I personally require to last out by owning it." And so he did. Halley's comet can be seen in the Earth's skies once every 75-76 years. It was visible on November 30, 1835, when Mark Twain was born and was also visible on April 21, 1910, when he died (although the exact dates of Halley's highpoint were November 16th and April 10th, respectively).

Museums and attractions
Twain's Hartford, Connecticut home is a museum and National Historic Landmark, known as [http://www.marktwainhouse.org/ The Mark Twain House]. Twain also lived in the latter part of the 19th century in Elmira, New York where he had met his wife, and had many close ties. He and many members of his family lie buried in a wooded knoll in Woodlawn National Cemetery there. A small octagonal study, given to him as a gift when he lived at Quarry Farm east of Elmira and in which he wrote parts or all of several works, is now located on the grounds of Elmira College.

The big town of Hannibal, Missouri is another town that features many Mark Twain attractions including a boyhood house of his and the caves he used to explore that feature in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Two American steam-powered paddle boats travelling the Rivers of America attractions at Disneyland and Disneyland Paris are named after Mark Twain. An Audio-Animatronic Mark Twain and Benjamin Franklin host The American Adventure show at Epcot.

Mark Twain as a character
Hal Holbrook famously portrayed Mark Twain in a one-man show on stage and on television Sam Clemens is a character in Philip José Farmer's Riverworld. In the film version he is portrayed by actor Cameron Daddo. The journalist Clemens makes an appearance in Neil Gaiman's comic book series The Sandman, in issue #31, "Three Septembers and a January", where he is proclaimed Royal Storyteller by the Emperor of the United States, Norton I. Samuel Clemens is a character in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes "Time's Arrow Part I"and "Time's Arrow Part II", portrayed by actor Jerry Hardin. Samuel Clemens appears as a viewpoint character in Harry Turtledove's book How Few Remain. Robert A. Heinlein modeled the father of Maureen in To Sail Beyond the Sunset after Mark Twain, and included him as a minor character in one scene. Major character in The Adventures of Mark Twain, a film in claymation by Will Vinton Studios. Samuel Clemens arrives in Virginia City, Nevada, in an episode of Bonanza as a reporter who causes some trouble for the Cartwrights.

Bibliography
(1867) The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (fiction) (1869) Innocents Abroad (non-fiction travel) (1871) Autobiography and First Romance (fiction) (1872) Roughing It (non-fiction) (1873) The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (fiction) (1875) Sketches New and Old (fictional stories) (1876) Old Times on the Mississippi (non-fiction) (1876) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (fiction) (1877) A True Story and the Recent Carnival of Crime (stories) (1878) Punch, Brothers, Punch! and other Sketches (fictional stories) (1880) A Tramp Abroad (non-fiction travel) (1880) 1601: Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors (fiction) (1882) The Prince and the Pauper (fiction) (1883) Life on the Mississippi (non-fiction) (1884) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (fiction) (1889) ''A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (fiction) (1892) The American Claimant (fiction) (1892) Merry Tales (fictional stories) (1893) The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories (fictional stories) (1894) Tom Sawyer Abroad (fiction) (1894) Pudd'n'head Wilson (fiction) (1896) Tom Sawyer, Detective (fiction) (1896) Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (fiction) (1897) How to Tell a Story and other Essays (non-fictional essays) (1897) Following the Equator (non-fiction travel) (1900) The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (fiction) (1901) Edmund Burke on Croker and Tammany (political satire) (1902) A Double Barrelled Detective Story' (fiction) (1904) ''A Dog's Tale (fiction) (1905) King Leopold's Soliloquy (political satire) (1905) The War Prayer (fiction) (1906) The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories (fiction) (1906) What Is Man? (essay) (1907) Christian Science (non-fiction) (1907) A Horse's Tale (fiction) (1907) Is Shakespeare Dead? (non-fiction) (1909) Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (fiction) (1909) Letters from the Earth (fiction, published posthumously) (1916) The Mysterious Stranger (fiction, published posthumously) (1924) Mark Twain's Autobiography'' (non-fiction, published posthumously)