Mark Twain

Mark Twain's real name was Samuel Clemens. He was born in Florida, a town in Missouri, USA, in 1835 and he then lived in Hannibal, Missouri. When he was twelve, his father died, and he went out to work. He began to write for his brother's newspaper and later he wrote for newspapers in Nevada and California. From 1857 to 1861, he was a river-pilot, guiding river boats on the great Mississippi river. The name "Mark Twain" came from his life on the Mississippi. The river-pilots called out words like these to the captain of the boat, and "mark twain" meant that there were two fathoms of water (about four metres) under the boat.

He started to write books of stories in 1867 and became famous for making people laugh. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1884) are his two most famous books. Many of the people and places in these stories are from the years when Mark Twain was a boy in Hannibal (Hannibal is the town of St Petersburg in this story).

Mark Twain wrote manys books. Some of them were important, some not so important, and he travelled to many English-speaking countries, talking about his work. Sadly, he had money problems, and his wife and two of his three daughters died before him, so his life was difficult and unhappy when he was older. He died in 1910.

Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Oxford Bookworms Library; Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998, page 52