Mark Twain

1835–1910

American humorist and novelist whose Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn drew on his Mississippi River boyhood Show bio

Bio

Mark Twain lost his father at 11 and left school to become a printer's apprentice. He set type by day and taught himself in public libraries at night.

Twain piloted Mississippi steamboats, and their crews' call for safe water became his pen name. He failed as a silver miner in Nevada and turned to writing humorous newspaper pieces. Twain wove the slavery of his Missouri childhood into the novels Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

He earned a fortune writing and lecturing, but went bankrupt and still repaid every creditor. Twain had lost most of it on a machine for setting type, his first trade.

Book by Mark Twain

  1. Life on the Mississippi
    1883

    This memoir combines memories of training as a steamboat pilot with an account of a later Mississippi River journey. Young Twain must learn to read the river’s shifting channels under the demanding pilot Horace Bixby.

    10h 17m reading time