Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, and essayist. Widely regarded as one of the major figures in American literature, he was praised for the comic force of his style and, by later critics, as a writer of both humor and serious social insight. William Faulkner famously called him “the father of American literature.”
Twain was born in Florida, Missouri, and grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, a Mississippi River town that later inspired the settings of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He worked first as a printer’s apprentice and typesetter, then as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River. After the American Civil War disrupted river traffic, he went west, mined briefly in Nevada Territory, and turned to journalism. It was there that he adopted the name “Mark Twain,” a riverboat sounding term.
He first gained wide attention with “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865). His later books included The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, The Gilded Age (cowritten with Charles Dudley Warner), The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and Pudd'nhead Wilson. Huckleberry Finn is often considered his greatest work and among the greatest American novels.
Twain also became famous as a public speaker. His career brought him success and financial reverses: he invested heavily in unsuccessful business ventures, including the Paige Compositor, and eventually declared bankruptcy, though he later repaid his creditors. In his later years he wrote satirical criticism of Christian Science and anti-imperialist works such as “King Leopold's Soliloquy”. He died in Redding, Connecticut, on the day after Halley's Comet reached its nearest point to the Sun, an event he had predicted would coincide with his death.