Mark TwainSamuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 April 21, 1910), well known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. Mark Twain is noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which has been called the Great American Novel, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Mark Twain was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.Mark Twain was very popular, and his keen wit and incisive satire earned praise from critics and peers. Upon his death he was lauded as the greatest American humorist of his age, and William Faulkner called Mark Twain the father of American literature.Early life:Mark Twain was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835. He was the sixth of seven children. Only three of his siblings survived childhood. Twain was born two weeks after the closest approach to Earth of Halleys Comet. On December 4, 1985, the United States Postal Service issued a stamped envelope for Mark Twain and Halleys Comet. www.21-cn-jy.comWhen Twain was four, his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a port town on the Mississippi River that served as the inspiration for the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At that time, Missouri was a slave state, and young Twain became familiar with the institution of slavery, a theme he would later explore in his writing.【来源：21世纪教育网】Twains father was an attorney and a local judge. The Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad was organized in his office in 1846. The railroad connected the then second and third largest cities in the state and was the furthermost west United States railroad until the Transcontinental Railroad was constructed. It delivered the mail to and from the Pony Express. 2-1-c-n-j-yIn March 1847, when Twain was 11, his father died of pneumonia. The next year, he became a printers 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 he 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 sources of information than he would have at a conventional school. At 22, Twain returned to Missouri.21教育名师原创作品On a voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi, the steamboat pilot, Horace E. Bixby, inspired Twain to pursue a career as a steamboat pilot. As Twain later observed in Life on the Mississippi, the pilot surpassed a steamboats captain in prestige and authority; it was a richly rewarding occupation with wages set at $250 per month, roughly equivalent to $72,400 a year today. A steamboat pilot needed a vast knowledge of the ever-changing river to be able to stop at the hundreds of ports and wood-lots along the river banks. Twain meticulously studied 2,000 miles (3,200 km) of the Mississippi for more than two years before he received his steamboat pilot license in 1859.21教育网While training, Samuel convinced his younger brother Henry to work with him. Henry was killed on June 21, 1858, when the steamboat on which he was working, the Pennsylvania, exploded. Twain had foreseen this death in a detailed 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 served as a river pilot until the American Civil War broke out in 1861 and traffic along the Mississippi was curtailed.21*cnjy*comMissouri was a slave state, considered by many to be part of the South, and was represented in both the Confederate and Federal governments during the Civil War. Years later, 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. Travels: In 1867 Twain joined his brother, Orion, who in 1861 had been appointed secretary to James W. Nye, the governor of Nevada Territory, and headed west. Twain and his brother traveled for more than two weeks on a stagecoach across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, visiting the Mormon community in Salt Lake City along the way. These experiences inspired Roughing It, and provided material for The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. Twains journey ended in the silver-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, where he became a miner. Twain failed as a miner and found work at a Virginia City newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise. Here he first used his famous pen name. On February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous travel account Letter From Carson re: Joe Goodman; party at Gov. Johnsons; music with Mark Twain.21cnjycomTwain moved to San Francisco, California in 1864, where he continued working as a j