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“Mark Twain was the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs.” —William Faulkner
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” —Ernest Hemingway
“[Twain’s] service as delightful entertainment to generations of American youngsters is equaled only by his influence on such twentieth-century admirers as Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway.” —Masterpieces of World Literature
“A careful and conscious artist, Twain became a master of the technical devices of exaggeration, irreverence, and deadpan seriousness; sensitive to the sound of language, he introduced colloquial speech into American fiction.” —Reader’s Encyclopedia
“Twain’s…novels are not politically correct. They do, however, reflect the time in which they were written, the nineteenth century, and give humorous asides about all manner of topics.” —SoundCommentary.com
“Twain is the funniest literary American writer…It must have been a great pleasure to be him.” —George Saunders, New York Times bestselling author
“Twain’s irony is delicious and far reaching; his facetious satire penetrates the very soul of appreciation. His drolleries are wickedly amusing. No one in full sympathy with humor can read Mark Twain’s best things and not laugh heartily over them.” —New Leader
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Biography
Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel L. Clemens (1835–1910), was born in Florida, Missouri, and grew up in Hannibal on the west bank of the Mississippi River. He attended school briefly and then at age thirteen became a full-time apprentice to a local printer. When his older brother Orion established the Hannibal Journal, Samuel became a compositor for that paper and then, for a time, an itinerant printer. With a commission to write comic travel letters, he traveled down the Mississippi. Smitten with the riverboat life, he signed on as an apprentice to a steamboat pilot. After 1859, he became a licensed pilot, but two years later the Civil War put an end to the steam-boat traffic.
In 1861, he and his brother traveled to the Nevada Territory where Samuel became a writer for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, and there, on February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous account with the pseudonym Mark Twain. The name was a river man’s term for water “two fathoms deep” and thus just barely safe for navigation.
In 1870 Twain married and moved with his wife to Hartford, Connecticut. He became a highly successful lecturer in the United States and England, and he continued to write.
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Mark Twain