Biographie de Mark Twain
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 type-setter, 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, as a prospector and a journalist, Clemens lived in Nevada and California.
In February 1863 he first used the pseu-donym "Mark Twain" as the signature to a humorous travel let-ter ; and 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), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (188o), The Prince and the Pauper (188z), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).
Following the publication of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (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 celebrated for his white suit and his urane of white hair as he was for his uncompromising stands against injustice and imperial-ism and for his invariably quoted comments on any subject under the sun.
Samuel Clemens died on April 24 1910. JOHN SEELYE is a graduate research professor of American liter-ature at the University of Florida. He is the author of The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain in the Movies, Prophetic Waters : The River in Early American Literature, Beautiful Machine : Rivers and the Early Republic, Memory's Nation : The Place of Plymouth Rock, and War Games : Richard Harding Davis and the New Imperialism.
He is the consulting editor for Penguin Classics in American literature.
