Authors Life

Early Life

Mark Twain was born November 20th, 1835 in Florida, Missouri. He was born not as Mark Twain but as Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Later his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri right on the Mississippi River. This is what inspired many of his stories later on in life. His father, John Marshall Clemens, died when Mark was only 11. Later, he dropped school and became a printer's apprentice.

In his early days after he dropped school, he became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River. Being on the Mississippi river helped him create his pen name, "Mark Twain",. His name "Mark Twain" is a river term that means "two fathoms deep". The civil war ended Marks steamboat career and that's when he moved out west to Nevada, California. He was a printer/journalist there. During that time he wrote humorous sketches. During his early writing Career as Mark Twain, he gained fame with "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" in 1865.  Mark then kept writing from there. He wrote some his earlier pieces like "Roughing it", and "The Innocents abroad. A little later he wrote his most famous pieces. in 1872-73, he wrote "Adventures of Tom Sawyer". He later published it in 1876. Almost a decade later, Mark twain wrote and published arguably his most famous piece of writing.