Mark Twain
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.
Books by Mark Twain
Adventures of Huckleberry FinnA boy narrates his journey down the Mississippi River with Jim, a man escaping slavery. Two con men posing as a duke and a king draw them into a series of river-town scams.
The Adventures of Tom SawyerThis novel follows a mischievous boy’s adventures in a small town beside the Mississippi River. Tom famously turns painting a fence into a privilege his friends pay to enjoy.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's CourtThis comic novel follows a Connecticut factory worker who finds himself in King Arthur's Britain. Knowing when a solar eclipse will occur, he uses it to escape execution and claim magical powers.
Life on the MississippiThis 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.