Mark Twain (1835-1910)

- born November 30, 1835
- real name: Samuel Langhorne Clemens
- “Mark Twain”: two-fathom sounding od safe water for steamboats
- his life encapsulates changes in American life
1. frontier to the city
2. river boat to the railroads
3. rough adolsecence to maturity
- When he was born, James Madison, the last of the Founding Fathers, was still alive. Milwaukee was founded, civil war erupted in Texas, and one New York newspaper suggests that there is vegetation on the moon.
- When he died, American was on the brink of World War I and had become one of the most powerful nations in the world. There were cars and airplanes. NAACP is organized, founding of Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls, and comet pills are selling briskly as Halley’s comet gets close to earth (thought tail made of poisonous gas)

- Grew up in Hannibal, MO on banks of Mississippi River
- Saw steamboats operating on the river and drew inspiration from them later in life
- Brief schooling
- At 18, leaves for Philadelphia, NY, Wash. as a journalist
- Then to Cincinnati and South America
- Became Miss. roverboat pilot before Civil War
- Twain supports south at onset of the war and briefly fights for the Confederates
- Brother, orion, persaudes him to go west to carson City, NV
- Dabbled in mining, but writing kept calling to him
- wrote “Jumping Frog” in 1865, which brought him national attention
- traveled to Europe as a travel writer
- went on lecture circuit in USA
- 1870 - marries Olivia Langdon and in 1871 moves to Hartford, CT
- In CT he writes his two American masterpieces: Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huck Finn (1885)
- Dies in CT in 1910
- William Dean Howells: Twain is “the Lincoln of our literature.”