Mark Twain

Mark Twain (1835–1910) was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, raised in Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi, where he was a printer's apprentice before becoming a steamboat pilot and a newspaperman in Nevada and California. The Innocents Abroad made him famous in 1869; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court followed. A bad investment in a typesetting machine bankrupted him in 1894 and he paid his creditors in full by a lecture tour around the world. His later years, darkened by the deaths of his wife and two daughters, produced his bitterest writing.