He was born in November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri.
His real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, but he was always better known by his pen name, Mark Twain.
His father was John Marshall Clemens and his mother was Jane Lampton Clemens.
Mark Twain was the sixth of seven children.
He was the only one of his three siblings who survived childhood.
His siblings were Orion Henry, who died in a riverboat explosion, and Pamela. His sister Margaret died when Mark was three, and his brother Benjamin died three years later. He had another brother, Pleasant, died at six months.
When Mark was four, his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, port town on the Mississippi River that inspired the fictional town of St. Peters burg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Missouri was a slave state and young Twain became familiar with the institution of slavery, a theme he would later explore in his writing.
Twain’s father was an attorney and a local judge. The Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad as organized in his office in 1846. The railroad connected the second and third largest cities in the state and was the westernmost United States railroad until the Transcontinental Railroad. It delivered mail to and from the Pony Express.
In March 1847, when Twain was 11, his father died of pneumonia.
The next year, Mark became a printer's apprentice.
In 1851, he began working as a typesetter and contributor of articles and humorous sketches for the Hannibal Journal, a newspaper owned by his brother Orion.
When Mark Twain was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. He joined the union and educated himself in public libraries in the evenings, finding wider information than at a conventional school.
When Mark Twain was 22 years old he returned to Missouri.
On a voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi, steamboat pilot Horace E. Bixby inspired Mark Twain to be a steamboat pilot. A steamboat pilot needed to know the ever-changing river to be able to stop at the hundreds of ports and wood-lots. Twain studied 2,000 miles (3,200 km) of the Mississippi for more than two years before he received his steamboat pilot license in 1859.
While training, Mark convinced his younger brother Henry to work with him. Henry was killed on June 21, 1858, when the steamboat he was working on, the Pennsylvania exploded.
Twain had foreseen this death in a dream a month earlier, which inspired his interest in parapsychology; he was an early member of the Society for Psychical Research. Twain was guilt-stricken and held himself responsible for the rest of his life. He continued to work on the river and was a river pilot until the American Civil War broke out in 1861 and traffic along the Mississippi was curtailed
Missouri was considered by many to be part of the South, and was represented in both the Confederate and Federal governments during the Civil War.
Twain wrote a sketch, "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed", which claimed he and his friends had been Confederate volunteers for two weeks before disbanding their company
Twain passed through a period of deep depression, which began in 1896 when his daughter Susy died of meningitis. Olivia's death in 1904 and Jean's on December 24, 1909, deepened his gloom
On May 20, 1909, his close friend Henry Rogers died suddenly.
In 1906, Twain began his autobiography in the North American Review. In April, Twain heard that his friend Ina Coolbrith had lost nearly all she owned in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, and he volunteered a few autographed portrait photographs to be sold for her benefit. To further aid Coolbrith, George Wharton James visited Twain in New York and arranged for a new portrait session. Initially resistant, Twain admitted that four of the resulting images were the finest ones ever taken of him.Twain formed a club in 1906 for girls he viewed as surrogate granddaughters, the Angel Fish and Aquarium Club. The dozen or so members ranged in age from 10 to 16. Twain exchanged letters with his "Angel Fish" girls and invited them to concerts and the theatre and to play games. Twain wrote in 1908 that the club was his "life's chief delight."
Oxford University awarded Twain an honorary doctorate in letters in 1907.
In 1909, Twain is quoted as saying: I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.
His prediction was accurate – Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut, one day after the comet's closest approach to Earth
Upon hearing of Twain's death, President William Howard Taft said: "Mark Twain gave pleasure – real intellectual enjoyment – to millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasure to millions yet to come... His humor was American, but he was nearly as much appreciated by Englishmen and people of other countries as by his own countrymen. He has made an enduring part of American Literature."
Twain's funeral was at the "Old Brick" Presbyterian Church in New York. He is buried in his wife's family plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in Elemira, New York. His grave is marked by a 12-foot (i.e., two fathoms, or "mark twain") monument, placed there by his surviving daughter, Clara. There is also a smaller headstone.
Marriage and Children
Charles Langdon showed a picture of his sister, Olivia, to Twain; Twain claimed to have fallen in love at first sight. The two corresponded throughout 1868, but Olivia rejected his first marriage proposal. Two months later they were engaged and a year later married in February 1870 in Elmira, New York. She came from a "wealthy but liberal family," and through her he met abolitionists "socialists, principled atheists and activists for women’s rights and social equality," including Harriet Beecher Stowe (his next door neighbor in Hartford, Connecticut), Frederick Douglass, and the writer and socialist William Dean Howells, who became a longtime friend.
The couple lived in Buffalo, New York from 1869 to 1871. Twain owned a stake in the Buffalo Express newspaper, and worked as an editor and writer. While living in Buffalo, their son Langdon died of diphtheria at 19 months
In 1871, Twain spent many of his summers in Elmira, which is also where he courted his wife Olivia before he married her.
Quarry Farm that Twain did most of his writing, such as The Adventures of Tome Sawyer (1876), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).
Quarry Farm was the home of Twain's sister-in-law, Susan Crane. As a gift, the Cranes also gave Mark Twain a study for him to work in. Twain moved his family to Hartford, Connecticut, where starting in 1873, he arranged the building of a home (local admirers saved it from demolition in 1927 and eventually turned it into a museum focused on him). While living in Elmira, Olivia gave birth to three daughters: Susy (1872–1896), Clara (1874–1962) and Jean (1880–1909). The couple's marriage lasted 34 years, until Olivia's death in 1904. All of the Clemens families are buried in Elmira's Woodlawn Commentary.
Poems:
Genius by Mark Twain
Genius, like gold and precious stones,
is chiefly prized because of its rarity.
Geniuses are people who dash of weird, wild,
incomprehensible poems with astonishing facility,
and get booming drunk and sleep in the gutter.
Genius elevates its possessor to ineffable spheres
far above the vulgar world and fills his soul
with regal contempt for the gross and sordid things of earth.
It is probably on account of this
that people who have genius
do not pay their board, as a general thing.
Geniuses are very singular.
If you see a young man who has frowsy hair
and distraught look, and affects eccentricity in dress,
you may set him down for a genius.
If he sings about the degeneracy of a world
which courts vulgar opulence
and neglects brains,
he is undoubtedly a genius.
If he is too proud to accept assistance,
and spurns it with a lordly air
at the very same time
that he knows he can't make a living to save his life,
he is most certainly a genius.
If he hangs on and sticks to poetry,
notwithstanding sawing wood comes handier to him,
he is a true genius.
If he throws away every opportunity in life
and crushes the affection and the patience of his friends
and then protests in sickly rhymes of his hard lot,
and finally persists,
in spite of the sound advice of persons who have got sense
but not any genius,
persists in going up some infamous back alley
dying in rags and dirt,
he is beyond all question a genius.
But above all things,
to deftly throw the incoherent ravings of insanity into verse
and then rush off and get booming drunk,
is the surest of all the different signs
of genius.
To Jennie by Mark Twain
Good-bye! a kind good-bye,
I bid you now, my friend,
And though 'tis sad to speak the word,
To destiny I bend
And though it be decreed by Fate
That we ne'er meet again,
Your image, graven on my heart,
Forever shall remain.
Aye, in my heart thoult have a place,
Among the friends held dear,-
Nor shall the hand of Time efface
The memories written there.
Goodbye,
S.L.C.
Mark Twain
Born in November 30, 1835 - Died April 21, 1910
Life:
Early Life:Marriage and Children
Poems:
Genius by Mark Twain
Genius, like gold and precious stones,is chiefly prized because of its rarity.
Geniuses are people who dash of weird, wild,
incomprehensible poems with astonishing facility,
and get booming drunk and sleep in the gutter.
Genius elevates its possessor to ineffable spheres
far above the vulgar world and fills his soul
with regal contempt for the gross and sordid things of earth.
It is probably on account of this
that people who have genius
do not pay their board, as a general thing.
Geniuses are very singular.
If you see a young man who has frowsy hair
and distraught look, and affects eccentricity in dress,
you may set him down for a genius.
If he sings about the degeneracy of a world
which courts vulgar opulence
and neglects brains,
he is undoubtedly a genius.
If he is too proud to accept assistance,
and spurns it with a lordly air
at the very same time
that he knows he can't make a living to save his life,
he is most certainly a genius.
If he hangs on and sticks to poetry,
notwithstanding sawing wood comes handier to him,
he is a true genius.
If he throws away every opportunity in life
and crushes the affection and the patience of his friends
and then protests in sickly rhymes of his hard lot,
and finally persists,
in spite of the sound advice of persons who have got sense
but not any genius,
persists in going up some infamous back alley
dying in rags and dirt,
he is beyond all question a genius.
But above all things,
to deftly throw the incoherent ravings of insanity into verse
and then rush off and get booming drunk,
is the surest of all the different signs
of genius.
To Jennie by Mark Twain
Good-bye! a kind good-bye,I bid you now, my friend,
And though 'tis sad to speak the word,
To destiny I bend
And though it be decreed by Fate
That we ne'er meet again,
Your image, graven on my heart,
Forever shall remain.
Aye, in my heart thoult have a place,
Among the friends held dear,-
Nor shall the hand of Time efface
The memories written there.
Goodbye,
S.L.C.
Ariyel Yavalar