Twain, Mark
Twain, Mark , pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens ( 1835 – 1910 ),American writer, born in Florida, Missouri, of a Virginian family, and brought up in Hannibal, Missouri. After his father's death in 1847 he was apprenticed to a printer, and wrote for his brother's newspaper; from 1857 to 1861 he was a pilot on the Mississippi, and from 1862 worked as a newspaper correspondent for various Nevada and Californian magazines, adopting the pseudonym ‘Mark Twain’, familiar to him as the leadsman's call on the Mississippi. Under this name he published his first successful story, ‘Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog’, in 1865 in the New York Saturday Press. This comic version of an old folk tale became the title story of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches ( 1867 ), which established him as a leading humorist, a reputation consolidated by The Innocents Abroad ...
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