Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, about forty miles southwest of Hannibal, the Mississippi River town Clemens was to celebrate as Mark Twain. In 1853 he left home, earning a living as an itinerant typesetter, and four years later became an apprentice pilot on the Mississippi, a career cut short by the outbreak of the Civil War. For five years, Clemens lived in Nevada and California as a prospector and a journalist.
In February 1863 he first used the pseudonym "Mark Twain," as the signature to a humorous travel letter. A trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 became the basis of his first major book, The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), his account of experiences in the West, was followed by a satirical novel, The Gilded Age (1873), Sketches : New and Old (1875), Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (1880), The Prince and the Pauper (1882), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and his masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn (1885).
Following the publication of A Connecticut Yankee (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), Twain was compelled by debts to move his family abroad. By 1900 he had completed a round-the-world lecture tour, and, his fortunes mended, he returned to America. He was as famous for his white suit and his mane of white hair as he was for his uncompromising stands against injustice and imperialism and for his invariably quoted comments on any subject under the sun.
Samuel Clemens died on April 21, 1910. Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900) is remembered chiefly for his collaboration with Mark Twain on the novel The Gilded Age (1873). Louis J. Budd, James B. Duke Professor of English (Emeritus) at Duke University, is the author of Mark Twain : Social Philosopher (1962) and Our Mark Twain : The Making of His Pub Personality (1983). Among other Twain-related collections, has edited Mark Twain : The Contemporary Reviews (1999).
He the founding president of the Mark Twain Circle of America.
