Mark Twain

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, an American humorist, novelist, journalist and lecturer whose life spanned the age of the Mississippi steamboat, the Civil War, the settlement of the West and the rise of the United States as a world power. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, his novel of a boy and an escaped slave drifting down the Mississippi, is often called the Great American Novel.

Clemens was born on 30 November 1835 in Florida, Missouri, the sixth of seven children, and grew up from the age of four in Hannibal, a small port on the Mississippi. Missouri was then a slave state, a fact that runs through his best-known books, in which Hannibal becomes the fictional town of St Petersburg. The boy left school after the fifth grade to train as a printer, set type for his brother Orion's newspaper, and at 18 left to work as a printer in New York, Philadelphia, St Louis and Cincinnati.

His boyhood dream was to pilot a steamboat. Under the pilot Horace Bixby he spent more than two years learning the river from St Louis down to New Orleans before receiving his licence. The work later gave him his pen name, from the leadsman's call for a depth of two fathoms, safe water for a steamboat.

The American Civil War cut river traffic in 1861. Clemens served for about two weeks in a local Confederate volunteer unit that soon broke up, then went west with Orion, who had been appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory. He became a reporter in Virginia City, where he first signed himself Mark Twain in February 1863. He moved on to San Francisco in 1864, and in November 1865 his tall tale of a jumping frog in Calaveras County, printed in a New York weekly, made his name across the country.

A newspaper-funded cruise to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 produced The Innocents Abroad (1869). In 1870 he married Olivia Langdon of Elmira, New York, whose liberal family introduced him to reformers including Frederick Douglass. Roughing It (1872) recalled his years in the West. In 1873 the couple settled in Hartford, Connecticut.

The Hartford years, which lasted until 1891, were his most productive. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) recalled his boyhood. Life on the Mississippi (1883) returned to the river after more than twenty years, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) was told in Huck's own colloquial voice.

Twain earned large sums and lost them. He poured about $300,000 into the Paige typesetting machine, which the Linotype made obsolete, and his publishing house, after early success with the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, failed. In 1891 the family left Hartford for Europe, and in 1894 he declared bankruptcy. He set off in 1895 on a lecture tour around the world and paid his creditors in full although the law no longer required him to.

Twain returned to the United States in 1900 strongly opposed to empire. He had once welcomed American interests in Hawaii and the 1898 war with Spain, but the Philippine–American War changed his mind, and from 1901 until his death he was a vice-president of the Anti-Imperialist League. His satire King Leopold's Soliloquy (1905) attacked the abusive rule of Leopold II in the Congo Free State.

His daughter Susy died in 1896, his wife in 1904 and his daughter Jean in 1909. Born just after an appearance of Halley's Comet, he had predicted he would go out with it, and he died of a heart attack at his home in Redding, Connecticut, on 21 April 1910, the day after the comet's closest approach to the Sun.

Huckleberry Finn has been repeatedly removed from school reading lists, largely over its racial slurs, yet writers have treated it as foundational. Ernest Hemingway wrote that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."

Our 1880 map shows the United States of his Hartford years, and the 1900 map the country as it acquired overseas territories such as the Philippines, the expansion Twain campaigned against.