8 biography

 A curious fact is that his name was not Mark Twain, it was a pseudonym that he gave himself, which by the way Mark Twain is an expression used by sailors and navigators who sailed the Mississippi River. They used this as the minimum measure of water with which a boat could cross the Mississippi River, so Mark Twain was called Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens; Florida, USA, 1835 - Redding, id., 1910 was an American writer. A tireless adventurer, he found in his own life the inspiration for his literary works. He grew up in Hannibal, a small town on the Mississippi. At the age of twelve, he was left fatherless, dropped out of school, and became a printer's apprentice in a publishing house, while he began to write his first newspaper articles in Philadelphia and Saint Louis.

Mark Twain

At the age of eighteen, he decided to leave home and begin his travels in search of adventure and, above all, fortune. He worked as a typographer for a while in his region, and then headed for New Orleans; on the way he signed up as an apprentice pilot on a river steamer, a profession he was enthusiastic about and which he carried out for a while, until the Civil War of 1861 interrupted river traffic, putting an end to his career as a pilot.

He then headed west to the mountains of Nevada, where he worked in the primitive mining camps. His desire to make a fortune led him to search for gold, without much success, so he was forced to work as a journalist, writing articles that soon took on a personal style. His first literary success came in 1865, with the short story The Famous Jumping Frog of Calaveras, which appeared in a newspaper already signed with the pseudonym of Mark Twain, a technical name for pilots that means "mark two probes".

As a journalist, he traveled to San Francisco, where he met the writer Bret Harte, who encouraged him to pursue his literary career. He then began a period of continuous travels, as a journalist and lecturer, which took him to Polynesia and Europe, and whose experiences he recounted in the travel book Los Inocentes en el extranjero (1869), followed by A la Brega (1872), in which he recreated his adventures in the West.

After marrying Olivia Langdon in 1870, he settled in Connecticut. Six years later he published the first novel that would bring him fame, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, based on his childhood on the banks of the Mississippi. He had previously written a novel in collaboration with C. D. Warner, The Gilded Age (1873), which was considered rather mediocre.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

This is the best-known of his works, and it was a time to relive childhood and adolescence by mixing them with fiction. Although the novel is a narrative for children, full of adventures and the heroes are children, it also has a clear and direct message for adults.