Mark Twain (1835–1910)

Mark Twain

Writer, journalist, and lecturer, born in Florida, Missouri, USA. A printer (1847–57) and later a Mississippi river-boat pilot (1857–61), he adopted his name from a well-known call used when sounding the river shallows (‘Mark twain!’ meaning ‘by the mark two fathoms’). He edited for two years the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, and in 1864 moved to San Francisco as a reporter. In 1867 he visited France, Italy, and Palestine, gathering material for his The Innocents Abroad (1869), which established his reputation as a humorist. On his return to America, he settled in the East, and in 1870 married Olivia Langdon (d.1904), the daughter of a wealthy New York coal merchant. In 1871 they moved to Hartford, CT, where they built a distinctive house (now open to the public) at the centre of a community of artists, known as Nook Farm. His two greatest masterpieces, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), drawn from his own boyhood experiences, are firmly established among the world's classics; other favourites are A Tramp Abroad (1880) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). Widely known as a lecturer, he developed a great popular following. Financial speculations led to the loss of most of his earnings by 1894, and he embarked on a world lecture tour to restore some of his wealth. In his later years, he was greatly honoured (especially in England), but following the death of his wife and of two of his daughters, his writing took on a darker, pessimistic character, as seen in his autobiography (1924).

His Works

Novels
1876 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
1882 The Prince and the Pauper
1883 Life on the Mississippi
1884 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
1892 The American Claimant
1892 Tom Sawyer Abroad
1894 The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson
1895 Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
1896 Tom Sawyer, Detective
1906 What Is Man?
Stories
1865 The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
1869 The Innocents Abroad
1872 Roughing It
1875 Mark Twain's Sketches, New and Old
1880 A Tramp Abroad
1882 The Stolen White Elephant and Other Stories
1897 Following the Equator
1900 The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
1902 A Double Barrelled Detective Story
Editor
182–64 Territorial Enterprise
Collaborations
1873 The Gilded Cage
Autobiography
1924 Autobiography
Other
1897 How to Tell a Story and Other Essays
1904 Extracts from Adam's Diary
1905 King Leopold's Soliloquy
1906 Eve's Diary
1907 Christian Science
1909 Is Shakespeare Dead?
1909 Extracts from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven