What do you know about Mark Twain?

What do you know about Mark Twain?

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer. He is considered as the greatest humorist this country has produced. William Faulkner called him " the father of American literature".

Mark Twain was raised in the state of Missouri, which later provided the setting for Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He was the sixth of seven children in his family.

His father was a judge, who died of pneumonia in 1847, when Twain was 11. The next year, Twain left school after the fifth grade to become a printer's apprentice. In 1851, he began working as a typesetter, contributing articles and humorous sketches to the newspaper owned by his elder brother Orion. Then he worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia and other cities educating himself in public libraries in the evenings.

Some time later, he became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River. Piloting also gave him his pen name from " mark twain", the leadsman's cry for a measured river depth of 12 feet, which was safe water for a steamboat. He continued to work as a river pilot until the Civil War broke out in 1861.

In 1861 Mark Twain headed west to join his elder brother in Nevada. The brothers traveled more than two weeks on a stagecoach across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains.

Twain's journey ended in the silver-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, where he became a miner. He failed as a miner, but he referred humorously to his lack of success at mining, turning to journalism. He began to work for the Virginia City newspaper. His pen name was first used there in 1863.

His first success as a writer came when his humorous tall tale The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County was published in the New York weekly The Saturday Press (1865), bringing him national attention. It was even translated into French.

A year later, he traveled to the Hawaii as a reporter for the Sacramento Union. His letters to the Union were popular and became the basis for his first lectures.

In 1867, a local newspaper funded his trip to the Mediterranean aboard the Quaker City, including a tour of Europe and the Middle East. He wrote a collection of travel letters which were later compiled as The Innocents Abroad (1869). It was on this trip that he met his fellow passenger Charles Langdon, who showed him a picture of his sister Olivia. Twain later claimed to have fallen in love with her at first sight.

Twain and Olivia Langdon corresponded throughout 1868. She rejected his first marriage proposal, but they were married in 1870. The couple lived in Buffalo, New York, from 1869 to 1871. He worked for the Buffalo Express newspaper as an editor and writer. The couple had three daughters; their son died of diphtheria at the age of 19 months. The couple's marriage lasted 34 years until Olivia's death in 1904.

Twain was fascinated with science and scientific inquiry. He developed a close and lasting friendship with Nikola Tesla, and the two spent much time together in Tesla's laboratory.

Twain was an early proponent of fingerprinting as a forensic technique, featuring it in a tall tale in Life on the Mississippi (1883) and as a central plot element in the novel Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894).

Twain was born two weeks after Halley's Comet's closest approach in 1835; he said in 1909: “I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet”.

Twain's prediction was accurate; he died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut, one day after the comet's closest approach to Earth.

Twain wrote about 50 literary works including many classic novels such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889).

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