Mark Twain

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Clemens, who was born in Florida in 1835 but grew up in Missouri, where his most famous novels, ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ and ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’, took place. Twain never went to university, but was captain of a river boat and tried gold mining before he turned to journalism and literature. Twain’s work was often comic but he held strong opinions on many issues: religion, imperialism, vivisection and the rights of workers, among others. Twain often had financial troubles in his life, as he made poor investments. He also suffered great personal tragedies with the deaths of two of his children. He died in 1910, politically active until the last and still penning articles and non-fiction pieces. Ernest Hemingway, the Nobel Prize winning author, called ‘Huckleberry Finn’ the greatest work of American literature and Twain is seen today as the most American of authors and also one of the best that has ever lived.