Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the sixth of seven children of a merchant and his wife, spent his youth in Missouri when it was a slave state and, after working as a printer and steamboat pilot, became a journalist, travel writer, humorist, and satirist under the pen name Mark Twain, a Mississippi River term for water 12 feet deep and safe for a boat to pass without running aground. Though his writing earned him a great deal of money, he lost much of it on bad investments, especially failed technologies, even as he also worked as an innovator whose inventions included a steam engine and a machine to engrave printing plates. In 1839, when he was 4 years old, his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River; in 1848 he became a printer apprentice; by 1851 he was a typesetter contributing articles and humorous sketches to the newspaper owned by his oldest brother Orion; in 1857 a riverboat trip down the Mississippi inspired him to become a steamboat pilot, a lucrative profession he followed until river traffic was curtailed by the Civil War; in 1863, after a failed attempt as a miner, he began newspaper work and first used his famous pen name on a humorous account of his travels to the West; and in 1867 a newspaper funded a trip to Europe and the Middle East that later became The Innocents Abroad. In the middle of his career, he wrote two novels based on his boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884. Huckleberry Finn is considered one of the great American novels; it displayed his gift for naturalistic dialogue and lifelike human portraits, highlighted the growing moral struggle for white people to follow the present-day laws on runaway slaves, and humanized slaves as freedom-thirsty people. In 1893 he became friends with Standard Oil executive Henry Huttleston Rogers, who helped him secure his copyrights and recover from financial ruin by debt.

Indianapolis city (balance), Indiana · United States