Mark Twain was born in Florida, Missouri on November 30th, 1835 as Samuel Clemens. Soon after Mark Twain’s birth, his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri.
Mark Twain started his career as a journalist by writing for the small local paper called Hannibal Journal. Between 1857 and 1861 Mark Twain worked as a Mississippi riverboat pilot. The Civil War put an end to the steamboat river traffic, so Twain moved to Virginia City.
In 1864 Mark Twain moved to San Francisco, California, where he worked as a reporter. His “Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog” was published in The Saturday Press of New York in 1865 and later was reprinted all over the country.
“The Innocence Abroad” written in 1869 gained Mark Twain wide popularity and was his first bigger financial success as an author.
In 1870 Mark Twain married Olivia Langdon, and they settled in Hartford, Connecticut. The couple had two daughters.
While living in Hartford Mark Twain wrote one of his best works - The Gilded Age (1873); The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884); The Prince and the Pauper (1882), a children’s novel; Life on the Mississippi (1883). A Tramp Abroad (1880), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).
“The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is without a doubt the best Mark Twain’s work. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” was highly respected by famous writers like Stevenson and Dickens.
During 1890’s Twain found himself in big debt, due to the failure of his publishing business. He started a world lecture tour, in order to recover from his financial loss. The travel book “Following The Equator” (1897) was result of his encounters on this tour.
During his writing career, Mark Twain also wrote a considerable number of essays, published in various magazines.
Twain died on April 21, 1910.
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