Mark Twain

Biography

Samuel Langhorne Clemens entered the world in 1835 in the tiny town of Florida, Missouri, yet it was the river-hugging streets of nearby Hannibal that shaped the boy who would slip into history as Mark Twain. Before ink ever stained his fingers, he steered paddle-wheelers down the Mississippi, their whistles and sounding calls tattooing his memory. When the river trade stalled, he traded the wheelhouse for a grab-bag of vocations—typesetting in dusty print shops, chiseling for ore that never glittered, filing dispatches from frontier newsrooms, pacing lecture platforms like a seasoned showman. The alias he chose? A bit of pilot slang—“by the mark, twain”—the two-fathom measure that promised safe water, a name as measured and memorable as the stories he would soon set loose upon the world.