Twain, Mark

US writer. He established his reputation with the comic masterpiece The Innocents Abroad (1869) and two classic American novels, in dialect, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Twain's use of the vernacular (commonly spoken dialect), vivid characterization and descriptions, and the theme of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, underlying the humour, of man's inhumanity to man, has given it universal appeal. He also wrote satire, as in A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889). He is recognized as one of America's finest and most characteristic writers.

Born in Florida, Missouri, Twain grew up along the Mississippi River in Hannibal, Missouri, the setting for many of his chief works. His education was cut short by his father's death in 1847, and he was apprenticed to a printer, writing articles for the Missouri Courier, which his brother ran. From 1857, he was employed as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi until the boats stopped running on the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. He then moved west, taking a job as city editor of a Nevada newspaper. There he began to write under the pseudonym ‘Mark Twain’ (the call of pilots when taking soundings, meaning ‘two fathoms’). The tale ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County’ was his first success. After a trip by boat to Palestine, he wrote The Innocents Abroad. As his writing career blossomed, he also became successful as a lecturer. In the 1870s he settled in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1884 he invested in a publishing house; it went bankrupt a decade later, leaving Twain penniless. In 1895 he embarked on a world lecture tour, described in Following the Equator (1897), and managed to clear his debts. His later works, such as The Mysterious Stranger, unpublished until 1916, are less humorous and more pessimistic.