A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Mark Twain (the most well-known pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemons) was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, and grew up in Hannibal, a Missouri town along the Mississippi river. Hannibal was to play a significant role in some of Twain's most popular books and stories. When Twain was twelve, his father died. Twain then helped support his family by going to work as a printer's apprentice. After several failed business partnerships with his brother Orion, he took off across the American west, selling travel pieces to newspapers.

In 1857, Twain left on a trip to South America, with a contract to write about his adventures. While traveling down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, Twain struck up a friendship with a riverboat captain named Horace Bixby. Twain abandoned his plan and instead became Bixby's apprentice, earning his own license to pilot steamboats in 1859. It was around this time that he adopted the name Mark Twain.

During the Civil War, Twain served for a short time in the Confederate army and then went out west, first to Nevada and then to San Francisco. In both places, he ran into trouble with the local governments for his sarcastic writings and had to leave each city in a hurry. It was at this time that Twain published his short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," which was printed in newspapers across America, making him famous. Twain's humor sketches and travel pieces provided him with a comfortable living. He married Olivia Langdon, who came from a wealthy, established family, and they eventually settled into Hartford, Connecticut, where they lived for the next twenty years.

Twain's first novel, The Gilded Age, was co-written with his friend and neighbor Charles Dudley Warner and published in 1873. Soon after that, he wrote the two books for which he is best remembered today: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court followed in 1889.

Twain was as famous during his lifetime as a lecturer as he was as a writer, traveling extensively across the United States and Europe, telling his humorous anecdotes before crowds of thousands. He received an honorary master's degree from Yale in 1888 and an honorary doctorate from the same institution in 1901. In addition, Twain received honorary doctorates from the University of Missouri in 1904 and from Oxford University in 1907.

In his later years, Twain became increasingly angry with the moral weaknesses of the human race. This anger only solidified after the deaths of his oldest daughter in 1896 and then his wife in 1904. Twain's later writings and lectures were marked by the dark bleakness of his vision of humanity's future. When he died of heart disease on April 21, 1910, Twain was recognized as one of the greatest authors that America had ever produced.