Mark Twain - Author
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on Novmber 30th 1835 during a comet shower, in Florida, Missouri. Samuel was the sixth child of John and Jane Clemens, and when he was four years old the family moved to nearby Hannibel. Samuel took the pen name ‘Mark Twain’ after he heard a call of ‘MARK TWAIN’ on board a boat he was sailing on, yelled by the leadsmen. ‘Mark Twain’ meant ‘safe navigation condition’. ‘Mark Twain’ was the cry for a measured river depth of two fathoms. Mark Twain started off his career as a river boat pilot on the Mississippi river but moved to the west to join a friend named Orion. There he learned how to print books as a printers apprentice. Twain was also a journalist working for newspapers in St Louis, New York, was a lecturer at a university, a entrepreneur (though this ended badly when he bought a faulty printer and lost all his income), and a inventor. He wrote his two major classics of American Literature “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. The settings in Samuel’s books were inspired by the places he experienced in Hannibal, as the county was a nice place to live but there was a great deal of violence. At the age of nine he witnessed a local man murder a cattle rancher, and at age ten he watched a slave die after a white overseer struck the slave with an iron rod.
In 1857 Samuel began learning the art of piloting an steamboat on his childhood river, the Mississippi. However his service on the boat was cut short by the out break of the Civil War in 1861. Samuel was also a reporter in 1861, and gained a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, but sadly lost all of his money in faulty investments and became bankrupt. This led to Samuel becoming severely depressed following the death of his daughter Suzy, who died young from the disease meningitis. This death was followed by his son Olivis in 1904 and then his wife Jean’s on December 24th, 1909. Samuel died in 1910 during the same comet shower he was born in, just before the start of the first world war.
In 1857 Samuel began learning the art of piloting an steamboat on his childhood river, the Mississippi. However his service on the boat was cut short by the out break of the Civil War in 1861. Samuel was also a reporter in 1861, and gained a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, but sadly lost all of his money in faulty investments and became bankrupt. This led to Samuel becoming severely depressed following the death of his daughter Suzy, who died young from the disease meningitis. This death was followed by his son Olivis in 1904 and then his wife Jean’s on December 24th, 1909. Samuel died in 1910 during the same comet shower he was born in, just before the start of the first world war.