orig. Samuel Langhorne Clemens
born Nov. 30, 1835, Florida, Mo., U.S.
died April 21, 1910, Redding, Conn.
U.S. humorist, writer, and lecturer.
He grew up in Hannibal, Mo., on the Mississippi River. At age 13 he was apprenticed to a local printer. In 1856 he signed on as an apprentice to a steamboat pilot. He plied the Mississippi for almost four years before going to Nevada and California. In 1863 he took his pseudonym, the riverman's term for water "two fathoms deep." In a California mining camp he heard the story that he would make famous as "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1865). He traveled widely, using his travels as subject matter for lectures and books, including the humorous narratives The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872). He won a worldwide audience for his stories of youthful adventures, especially Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Huckleberry Finn (1884), one of the masterpieces of American fiction. The satirical A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and increasingly grim works including Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) and The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900) followed. In the 1890s financial speculations bankrupted him, and his eldest daughter died. After his wife's death (1904), he expressed his pessimism about human character in such late works as the posthumously published Letters from the Earth (1962).