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Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), better known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American humorist, satirist, lecturer and writer. Twain is most noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which has since been called the Great American Novel, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He is also known for his quotations. During his lifetime, Twain became a friend to presidents, artists, leading industrialists and European royalty.

Twain enjoyed immense public popularity, and his keen wit and incisive satire earned him praise from both critics and peers. American author William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature."

When Twain was four, his family moved to Hannibal,[8] a port town on the Mississippi River that would serve as the inspiration for the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.[9] At that time, Missouri was a slave state in the Union, and young Twain became familiar with the institution of slavery, a theme he later explored in his writing.

In March 1847, when Twain was 11, his father died of pneumonia. The following year, he became a printer's apprentice. In 1851, he began working as a typesetter and contributor of articles and humorous sketches for the Hannibal Journal, a newspaper owned by his brother, Orion. When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. He joined the union and educated himself in public libraries in the evenings, finding wider sources of information than he would have at a conventional school. At 22, Twain returned to Missouri. On a voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi, the steamboat pilot, Bixby, inspired Twain to pursue a career as a steamboat pilot; it was a richly rewarding occupation with wages set at $250 per month, equivalent to $155,000 a year today.

Mark Twain’s first important work, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, was first published in the New York Saturday Press on November 18, 1865. The only reason it was published there was because his story arrived too late to be included in a book Artemus Ward was compiling featuring sketches of the wild American West.

 

Twain's next major publication was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which drew on his youth in Hannibal. The character of Tom Sawyer was modeled on Twain as a child, with traces of two schoolmates, John Briggs and Will Bowen. The book also introduced in a supporting role the character of Huckleberry Finn, based on Twain's boyhood friend Tom Blankenship.

 

Twain’s next major published work, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, solidified him as a noteworthy American writer. Some have called it the first Great American Novel. Finn was an offshoot from Tom Sawyer and proved to have a more serious tone than its predecessor. The main premise behind Huckleberry Finn is the young boy’s belief in the right thing to do even though the majority of society believes that it was wrong. The book has become required reading in many schools throughout the United States because Huck ignores the rules and mores of the age to follow what he thinks is just (the story takes place in the 1850s where slavery is present).

 

Twain next focused on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which featured him making his first big pronouncement of disappointment with politics. The tone become cynical to the point of almost being a rant against the established political system of the day (which would have been in King Arthur’s time), and eventually devolved into madness for the main character. The book was started in December 1885, then shelved a few months later until the summer of 1887, and eventually finished in the spring of 1889.

 

Bibliography
(1867) Advice for Little Girls (fiction)
(1867) The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (fiction)
(1868) General Washington's Negro Body-Servant (fiction)
(1868) My Late Senatorial Secretaryship (fiction)
(1869) The Innocents Abroad (non-fiction travel)
(1870-71) Memoranda (monthly column for The Galaxy magazine)
(1871) Mark Twain's (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance (fiction)
(1872) Roughing It (non-fiction)
(1873) The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (fiction, made into a play)
(1875) Sketches New and Old (fictional stories)
(1876) Old Times on the Mississippi (non-fiction)
(1876) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (fiction)
(1876) A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage (fiction); (1945, private edition), (2001, Atlantic Monthly).[55]
(1877) A True Story and the Recent Carnival of Crime (stories)
(1877) The Invalid's Story (Fiction)
(1878) Punch, Brothers, Punch! and other Sketches (fictional stories)
(1880) A Tramp Abroad (travel)
(1880) 1601: Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors (fiction)
(1882) The Prince and the Pauper (fiction)
(1883) Life on the Mississippi (non-fiction)
(1884) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (fiction)
(1889) A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (fiction)
(1892) The American Claimant (fiction)
(1892) Merry Tales (fictional stories)
(1892) Those Extraordinary Twins (fiction)
(1893) The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories (fictional stories)
(1894) Tom Sawyer Abroad (fiction)
(1894) The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (fiction)
(1896) Tom Sawyer, Detective (fiction)
(1896) Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (fiction)
(1897) How to Tell a Story and other Essays (non-fictional essays)
(1897) Following the Equator (non-fiction travel)
(1898) Is He Dead? (play)
(1900) The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (fiction)
(1900) A Salutation Speech From the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth (essay)
(1901) The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Updated (satire)
(1901) Edmund Burke on Croker and Tammany (political satire)
(1901) To the Person Sitting in Darkness (essay)
(1902) A Double Barrelled Detective Story (fiction)
(1904) A Dog's Tale (fiction)
(1904) Extracts from Adam's Diary (fiction)
(1905) King Leopold's Soliloquy (political satire)
(1905) The War Prayer (fiction)
(1906) The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories (fiction)
(1906) What Is Man? (essay)
(1906) Eve's Diary (fiction)
(1907) Christian Science (non-fiction critique)
(1907) A Horse's Tale (fiction)
(1907) Is Shakespeare Dead? (non-fiction)
(1909) Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (fiction)
(1909) Letters from the Earth (fiction, published posthumously)
(1910) Queen Victoria's Jubilee (non-fiction)
(1912) My Platonic Sweetheart (dream journal, possibly non-fiction)
(1916) The Mysterious Stranger (fiction, possibly not by Twain, published posthumously)
(1924) Mark Twain's Autobiography (non-fiction, published posthumously)
(1935) Mark Twain's Notebook (published posthumously)
(1962) Letters from the Earth (posthumous, edited by Bernard DeVoto)
(1969) No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (fiction, published posthumously)
(1985) Concerning the Jews (published posthumously)
(1992) Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War. Jim Zwick, ed. (Syracuse University Press) ISBN 0-8156-0268-5 (previously uncollected, published posthumously)
(1995) The Bible According to Mark Twain: Writings on Heaven, Eden, and the Flood (published posthumously)