Mark Twain's real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910), the sixth of seven children born to John and Jane Lampton Clemens in Florida, Missouri. Clemens was born shortly after the approach of Halley's Comet, and died the day after its next approach, a fact he had predicted.
The Clemens family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, when Sam was four-years-old. The town would serve as the setting for many of his stories, famous and lesser-known ones, sometimes under its own name and at other times (as in the Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer stories) as the fictional St Petersburg. He apprenticed to a local printer at age 12, the year after John Clemens died of pneumonia, and soon took on work as a typesetter for the Hannibal Journal, the local newspaper owned by his older brother. It was at the Journal that he published his first writing--a number of humorous sketches and occasional articles. At 18, he left Hannibal for the industrial cities, working in New York, Philadelphia, and St Louis as a printer while spending his nights and free days in the public libraries..
A trip from Missouri to New Orleans led to a career change, when Twain realized how much he enjoyed life on the steamboat, and how highly paid piloting was--the equivalent of a six-figure salary today, far more than he earned (or could earn) as a printer. Steamboat piloting paid so well in part because it demanded a special expertise: the ships were made of very dry wood, so no lamps were allowed on board, and traveling at night--or even in twilight or dawn conditions--required an extensive knowledge of the Mississippi River. Even with Twain's intellectual gifts and ability to focus, it took him two years to obtain his pilot's license, and he piloted for only two years more before river traffic was blocked by the onset of the Civil War.
Missouri was a slave state, but it didn't secede and join the Confederacy. Twain's later short story, "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed," chronicles the two-week lifespan of a Confederate militia he started with friends. Upon its rapid dissolution he headed west with his brother Orion, who had taken a job with the government of the Nevada Territory. Twain worked as a miner briefly before returning to newspaper writing in Virginia City, Nevada, and San Francisco, California. It was around this time, towards the end of the Civil War, that his career as a lecturer began, and he became a popular public speaker. For the rest of his career, which would frequently take him on lecture tours of the United States and Europe, he was as well-known as a lecturer as he was as a writer.
He soon met and married Olivia Langdon, who came from a well-off liberal family of abolitionists and feminists. They lived in Buffalo, New York for a few years before moving to Hartford, Connecticut, and had three children, all daughters. Twain continued to work as a writer, lecturer, and editor, and despite his great successes he seemed to lose his money as quickly as he made it--he was fascinated by the advances of the Industrial Revolution and tended to back the wrong horse when investing in new inventions, losing a great deal of money when the invention failed to work or sell well.
Twain outlived his wife and two of his daughters, and his last years were bleak. Having begun as a humorist, his final writings were cynical and intellectual, exploring determinism and the nature of man.
