Mark Twain的介绍

Mark Twain Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He was born in the small village of Florida, Missourion November 30, 1835. His family moved to Hannibal when Samuel was 4, where he spent his boyhood, fascinated by the romance and impressed by the violence of river life. Sam had relatively little schooling. He left school at 13, and became a full-time apprentice to a printer. At 18, he became a tramp printer and went to New York, then to Philadelphia and Washington, and finally to Iowa to set type for his brother's local paper. At22, he became a steamboat pilot's apprentice. About two years later, he became a pilot himself. He worked on the Mississippi River till 1861, learning a lot about human nature. In 1861,when the Civil War broke out, he became a Confederate guerrilla but retired after two weeks. Then he went to the West, and worked as a prospector, miner, and speculator, but failed. And then he did reporting for local papers. In February, 1863, he began to use the pen name Mark Twain, a river man's term for water that was just barely safe for navigation. In 1865, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County was published and he became famous. He married in 1870, and moved to Hartford, Conn. ,where he lived his most productive years (till 1891), during which he wrote Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Besides these two children's classics, he wrote many other important works in his life, among which were Roughing It, The Gilded Age, The Prince and Pauper, The One Million, Bank-Note and Other Stories, The Man that Corrupted Hadleybury and Other Stories and Sketches. He died in 1910.

Mark Twain was an American writer, journalist and humorist, who won a worldwide audience for his stories of the youthful adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

Clemens was born on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri, of a Virginian family. After his father's death in 1847, he was apprenticed to a printer and wrote for his brother's newspaper. He later worked as a licensed Mississippi river-boat pilot. The Civil War put an end to the steamboat traffic and Clemens moved to Virginia City, where he edited the Territorial Enterprise. On February 3, 1863, Mark Twain' was born when Clemens signed a humorous travel account with that pseudonym.

In 1864 Twain left for California, and worked in San Francisco as a reporter. He set out on a world tour, traveling in France and Italy. His experiences were recorded in 1869 in The Innocents Abroad, which gained him wide popularity, and poked fun at both American and European prejudices and manners.

The success as a writer gave Twain enough financial security to marry Olivia Langdon in 1870. Between 1876 and 1884 he published several masterpieces, Tom Sawyer (1881) and The Prince And The Pauper (1881). Life On The Mississippi appeared in 1883 and Huckleberry Finn in 1884.

In the 1890s Twain lost most of his earnings in financial speculations and in the failure of his own publishing firm. To recover from the bankruptcy, he started a world lecture tour, during which one of his daughters died.

During his long writing career, Twain also produced a considerable number of essays. The death of his wife and his second daughter darkened the author's later years, which is seen in his posthumously published autobiography (1924). Twain

died on April 21, 1910.