pseudonym of SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS, American humorist, writer, and lecturer who won a worldwide audience for his stories of youthful adventures, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

youth and early travels

Clemens was the sixth child of John Marshall and Jane Lampton Clemens. He was four when the family moved to nearby Hannibal, on the west bank of the Mississippi, where his father kept a dry-goods and grocery store, practiced law, and entered local politics. There Samuel spent his boyhood, enchanted by the romance of river life - the steamboats, keelboats, and giant lumber rafts and also the human flotsam washed up by the river: professional gamblers and confidence men, itinerant stevedores and indigent raftsmen. Hannibal was an ideal place for a boy to grow up, with its woods and hills, its opportunities for fishing, and a nearby island in the river.

Samuel's father died in 1847, when the boy was 11. From that time on, it became necessary for Samuel to contribute to the family's support. He became a delivery boy, grocery clerk, and blacksmith's helper during summers or after school. At the age of 13 he became a full-time apprentice to a local printer. When his brother Orion, 10 years older than he, established the Hannibal Journal, Samuel became a compositor for that paper.

In the late 1840s and the 1850s local humour flourished in New England and what then was the Southwest. These humorous writings introduced Samuel to techniques that were to figure prominently in some of his later work. He contributed some amateurish bits of humour to Orion's Journal and was the "S.L.C." of Hannibal whose sketch "The Dandy Frightening the Squatter " appeared in The Carpet-Bag, a Boston humorous paper, in May 1852. This was an anecdote similar to a number then going the rounds, contrasting the strength and forthrightness of a frontiersman with the weakness and foolishness of an Eastern dandy.

Since Orion was as poor a businessman as his father had been, the Journal did not do well, and young Clemens became restless. In 1853 he set out as an itinerant printer and worked his way eastward on newspapers in St. Louis, New York City, and Philadelphia. In the summer of 1854 he rejoined Orion, who had moved to Iowa. Except for a brief period as a printer in St. Louis, he worked at his trade for Orion in Keokuk until the fall of 1856. He then began another period of wandering, having secured a commission to write some comic travel letters for the Keokuk Daily Post. These, signed with the pseudonym "Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass," were characterized by the misspelling, atrocious grammar, and weirdly constructed sentences then becoming fashionable among rising humorists. But only five letters appeared, for on the way down the Mississippi toward New Orleans, Clemens met Horace Bixby, a steamboat pilot who agreed to take him on as an apprentice and teach him the mysteries of navigating the tortuous channels of the great and treacherous river. For almost four years Clemens plied the Mississippi; he remembered these years as the most carefree of his life. He claimed later never to have met a man anywhere whose kind he had not known before on the river. After 1859 he was a licensed pilot in his own right, but two years later the Civil War cut across the river, bringing an end to traffic from north to south.

After probably spending a few weeks during the spring of 1861 in the Confederate militia, Clemens joined his brother Orion in a trip to the Nevada Territory, where the latter had been appointed territorial secretary. After unsuccessful stock speculation in mining and timberlands and equally unsuccessful prospecting for gold and silver, Samuel became a writer for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. He signed his contributions "Josh" and delighted in perpetrating such journalistic hoaxes as an account of "The Petrified Man" and "The Empire City Massacre," preposterous tall tales told so plausibly that other newspapers reprinted them as true.

It was in Virginia City on Feb. 3, 1863, that "Mark Twain" was born when Clemens, then 27, signed a humorous travel account with that pseudonym. The new name was a riverman's term for water "two fathoms deep" and thus just barely safe for navigation. In the spring of 1864, Twain left Nevada for California. In San Francisco he met and was encouraged by the author Bret Harte and spent convivial evenings with Charles Farrar Browne, who, under the pseudonym Artemus Ward, was then one of the most popular American humorists and platform lecturers and who encouraged him to contribute to a collection of Western sketches that he planned to publish. Twain, however, chose to sojourn at a mining camp in the Tuolumne Hills, where he heard the story he would make famous as "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. " Published in a New York periodical, The Saturday Press, in November 1865, this story was an immediate hit when it was reprinted in newspapers far and wide. Written much in the manner of the Southwestern humour popular in Clemens' youth, this fine tall tale brought not only his first national fame but also the first approval of his work by several discerning critics.