Mark Twain - Samuel Langhorne Clemens

Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens is in fact the real name for Mark Twain. He was born on November 30, 1835. Sam Clemens got his sense of humor from his mother Jane Clemens. His father was a serious man always worrying about finances. Due to the lack of finances, in 1839, his family was forced to move from Florida, Missouri to Hannibal, Missouri, which was located on the Mississippi River. When Sam was 12 years old, his father died of pneumonia, causing more financial problems and Sam was thirteen years old when he started working as a printer’s apprentice to help the family out. Sam Clemens’ life influenced his writings.

Sam loved to travel and wanted to explore, so at the age of seventeen, Clemens left Hannibal, Missouri and went to work in St. Louis Missouri as a typesetter. He later worked in New York in a large print shop, and in Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., before moving to Keokuk Iowa to work as a partner in his brother’s print shop. He then went to Cincinnati, Ohio for a short time as a typesetter then headed to New Orleans, LA. on a steamboat and saw an opportunity to be a riverboat pilot’s apprentice. He earned his pilot’s license two years later in 1859. This is where he adopted the pen name Mark Twain which means, in steamboat slang, 12 feet of water. He loved being a riverboat pilot but when the civil war broke out the riverboat industry came to an end and he was out of a job, therefore he joined the confederacy for only a few weeks then ventured out west to Nevada and California (www.biography.com).

Twain again worked for his brothers’ newspaper in Nevada as a traveling journalist. While traveling around, he was mining in the Tuolumne foothills when he heard the story of the jumping frog, which was well known to that area. This is where he wrote Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog using the name Mark Twain, and in 1865 it was printed in newspapers and magazines around the country. He used his experience on a five-month cruise to the Mediterranean to write The Innocents Abroad in 1869 (www.biography.com). From his travels to the Swiss Alps, Twain wrote A Tramp Abroad in 1880.

Death had affected Clemens throughout his life. In February1870, Samuel Clemens married Olivia Langdon. The following November, their son Langdon was born. He died of diphtheria in June 1872 before he was two years old. In March 1872, their first daughter, Olivia Susan (Susy) Clemens was born. She died in August 1896 at the age of 24 of meningitis. Clara Langdon Clemens was born in June 1874. She out lived her family and died in November 1962 at 88 years old. Jane Lampton (Jean) Clemens was born in July 1880 and in 1896 was diagnosed with epilepsy and died in September 1909 at the age of 29, but before Jean died Clemens’ wife Olivia died in June 1904 after a long illness. Clemens had witnessed a lot of death, which made him sad. He did not write of the earlier

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