Mark Twain

About this figure

Mark Twain (1835–1910), the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was an American writer and humorist widely regarded as one of the country's greatest, a reputation built on a body of work ranging from broad frontier comedy to sharp social and moral criticism. Born in Missouri and raised in the Mississippi River town of Hannibal, he worked as a printer's apprentice, then trained and worked for several years as a licensed steamboat pilot on the Mississippi -- the source of his pen name, a river term meaning water two fathoms deep -- before the Civil War ended commercial river traffic and pushed him west, where he tried mining and turned finally to journalism and lecturing.

Twain's early fame rested on travel writing and comic sketches drawn from his own restless movement around the American West and abroad: Roughing It (1872) recounted his mining and stagecoach years in Nevada and California, and The Innocents Abroad (1869), an account of a group tour to Europe and the Holy Land, became a bestseller for its willingness to mock both foreign pretension and American tourists' credulity. His reputation as a serious literary artist rests most firmly on the novel he set on the river of his youth, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), narrated in the vernacular voice of an uneducated boy and widely considered a landmark in American fiction for its moral seriousness about slavery and its innovations in voice and dialect, despite the discomfort its language causes many modern readers. Life on the Mississippi (1883) combined memoir of his piloting years with an account of a return trip down the river after the war. Twain also wrote fiction more directly concerned with race and identity, including Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), a novel built around switched identities across the color line in a slaveholding Missouri town.

In later life Twain became known as a formidable public speaker, and a collection of his after-dinner and platform speeches survives as a record of that side of his career. He suffered severe financial setbacks, including bankruptcy in the 1890s brought on by a failed investment in an automatic typesetting machine, which he addressed by touring the world giving lectures, an experience recorded in Following the Equator (1897). His later writing, including the essays collected as What Is Man? (published anonymously in 1906, four years before his death), grew markedly more pessimistic about human nature and free will, and much of his darkest work was published only after his death. He was born shortly after a perihelion passage of Halley's Comet in 1835 and, as he predicted, died the day after its return in 1910.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.