MARK TWAIN (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) was born in Florida, Missouri on November 30, 1835 to a Tennessee country merchant, John Marshall Clemens, and Jane Lampton Clemens.  When Twain was four his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a port town on the Mississippi River that would serve as the inspiration for the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

In 1843 Twain became a printer's 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 educated himself in public libraries in the evenings.  At 22, he returned to Missouri. On a voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi, the steamboat pilot, Bixby, inspired him to pursue a career as a steamboat pilot.  Twain meticulously studied 2,000 miles of the Mississippi for more than two years before he received his steamboat pilot license in 1859.  He worked 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.

He then journeyed West, soon arriving in the silver mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, where he became a miner, an enterprise at which he failed.  He then found work at a Virginia City newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise.  On February 3, 1863 he for the first time signed a humorous travel account "Mark Twain."  After marriage to Olivia Langdon, the couple lived in Buffalo, New York from 1869 to 1871. Twain owned a stake in the Buffalo Express, and worked as an editor and writer. Their son Langdon died there of diphtheria at 19 months.

In 1871 Twain moved his family to Hartford, Connecticut where, commencing in 1873, he arranged the building of a striking home, which local admirers saved from demolition in 1927 and eventually turned into a museum focused on him.  There Olivia gave birth to three daughters: Susy, Clara and Jean. The couple's marriage lasted 34 years until Olivia's death in 1904.

Twain outlived his daughters Jean and Susy, passing through a period of deep depression which began in 1896 when his favorite daughter Susy died of meningitis. Olivia's death in 1904 and Jean's death on December 24, 1909 deepened his gloom.  In that year he said:

Twain's novel Tom Sawyer became highly popular; Tom's character had been modeled on Twain as a child, with traces of two schoolmates, John Briggs and Will Bowen.  The book also introduced in a supporting role the character of Huckleberry Finn, based on Twain's boyhood friend Tom Blankenship.  In between the writing of the badly-received The Prince and The Pauper, Twain had started Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  He had problems completing it, working on it off and on for almost a decade.

At mid-career, with Huckleberry Finn, he combined rich humor, sturdy narrative and social criticism.  Twain was a master at rendering colloquial speech and helped to create and popularize a distinctive American literature built on American themes and language. Huckleberry Finn has been repeatedly restricted in American high schools, not least for its frequent use of the "n" word, which was in common usage when the book was written.

When Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in 1885, the book solidified Twain as a noteworthy American writer.  Some, including Hemingway, have called it the first Great American Novel. Finn was an offshoot from Tom Sawyer and proved to have a more serious tone than its predecessor. The main premise behind Huckleberry Finn is the young boy’s belief in the right thing to do even though the majority of society believes that it was wrong.  The story takes place in the 1850s where slavery was still present.  Four hundred manuscript pages of Huckleberry Finn were written in the summer of 1876, right after the publication of Tom Sawyer. Some accounts have Twain taking seven years off after his first burst of creativity, eventually finishing the book in 1883.  Near the end of writing Huckleberry Finn, Twain wrote Life on the Mississippi, which is said to have heavily influenced the former book.  Scholars debate the actual years involved in the book's completion as well as the tone of the final 20% of the book in comparison to the previous chapters.  The work recounts Twain’s memories and new experiences after a 22-year absence from the Mississippi.  In Huckleberry Finn, Twain introduces the real meaning of his pseudonym.

At age 75, on April 21, 1910, Mark Twain died of a heart attack  in Redding, Connecticut.  He is buried in his wife's family plot in Elmira, New York.

                                                          -from Internet Sources