FREE ESSAY ON MARK TWAIN

MARK TWAIN

Mark Twain was born in Florida Missouri in 1835 to John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton.
Then he moved with the rest of his family 4 times in the first 6 months of his life. When
he was 4 years old they finally settled down in the small town of Hannibal, Missouri,
which was a port on the Mississippi River. The town of Hannibal consisted of mainly
farmers that worked in the country side and travelers that were only staying a few weeks
and then moving up stream. Some of the travelers were steamboat men, circus performers,
minstrel companies, and showboat actors. Since all this action was going on all the time,
that opened a big door to the beginning of Samuel's stories. He attended the local public
schools until the age of 12. when his father died in 1847 he was apprenticed to two local
printers in Hannibal. After his apprenticeship ended 1851, he worked for his brother
Orion's newspaper called Hannibal Journal. He mainly worked on setting the printers and
every so often he would draw comical sketches for the newspaper. After working at this
job he worked at three other jobs in Keokuk, Iowa; New York City, New York; and
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After those jobs Mark Twain was a steamboat captain until the
U.S. Civil War. During the civil war he served for only a short time in the Confederate
Calvary. In 1863 Samuel Clemens began signing with his pen name, Mark Twain. This is when
he really started getting interested in writing more than just short stories and
humoristic sketches. In 1865 Mark Twain retold a story that he had heard in the
California gold fields, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County". Within only a
few months of publishing this book he was know around the United States.
Mark twain would never stop writing. Every time that he got an idea or was told a story
that inspired him he wrote about it. In the year of 1867 he lectured around the country
and in Europe. He wrote about these journeys in the book titled "The Innocents Aboard".
In 1870 he married the love of his life, Olivia Langdon in Elmira, New York. After living
a short time in Buffalo, New York, Mr. And Mrs. Twain moved to Hartford, Connecticut.
During the 1870's and 1880's he wrote most of his books including: Roughing It, The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Tramp Aboard, The Prince and the Pauper, and A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Almost all of his books, even the children's books, were
related to some part of his life. For example, The Adventures Tom Sawyer recounts for his
boyhood on the Mississippi River. As Tom Sawyer was always causing mischief, so was
Samuel Clemens when he was a boy.
Mark twain's work in his later years showed lots of bitterness and anger because of the
death of his two daughters and wife. He also was starting to have a descent amount of
financial difficulty albeit he had lots of success selling his books. Other writers like
Ernest Hemingway and William Faulker looked up to him.
In the later part of Twain's life he wrote less. For the last three years of his life he
worked mainly on his autobiography. By now he had become a celebrity. He would frequently
speak on issues in public and was known for wearing a white linen suit. he died on april
10, 1910 he left an uncompleted autobiography that his secretary finished writing and
editing for him. That evening Twain passed away leaving the world with only the memory of
him through his writing Samuel Clemens still lives on in reader's hearts and minds
everywhere.