The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

MARK TWAIN, the pen-name for Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was born in Florida, Missouri in 1835. He moved with his family to the Mississippi River town of Hannibal when he was four years old. Later he made the scenes of his youth internationally famous in his most popular novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He left school at the age of twelve, and later travelled throughout the East and Midwest as a journeyman printer. From 1857 to 1861 he was a pilot on the great river Mississippi. He served briefly in the Confederate Army during the Civil War, but his Division deserted and he spent the remainder of the war out West, some of it prospecting for silver in Nevada with his brother-Orion, and then working with Bret Harte as a journalist in San Francisco. In 1863 he began using the name Mark Twain, and in 1865 made it famous with his story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. He quickly established his reputation as one of the best of the South-western humorists. Clemens moved to New York in 1867 and from that time made the East Coast and Europe his home. Within three years he was called “The People’s Author”; he established himself as one of the most popular platform performers of his time. He met and married Olivia Langdon, daughter of a rich and socially prominent New York family. Clemens’ second book, Innocents Abroad, based on a trip to Holy Land he took with a group of American tourists, was published in 1869 and was a great success. In the years immediately following he published Roughing It (1872), his first novel The Gilded Age (a collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner 1873), Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (1880), The Prince and the Pauper (1882), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Huckleberry Finn (1884), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).