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Portrait of Mark Twain

Literature · Novelists

Mark Twain

1835–1910 · American

Realism; humour and satire

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a former Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist and lecturer who became America's best-known humorist. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, drawn from his boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri, turned the vernacular voice into great literature. His later work grew darker and more satirical, attacking racism, imperialism and hypocrisy.

How to spot them

  • ▸Real name Samuel Langhorne Clemens; pen name from a riverboat depth call meaning two fathoms
  • ▸Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Becky Thatcher, Injun Joe and the escaped slave Jim
  • ▸Hannibal, Missouri and the Mississippi River; later lived in Hartford, Connecticut
  • ▸Born and died in years when Halley's Comet appeared (1835 and 1910)
  • ▸The report of his death was an exaggeration

Key works

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1865)

Tall-tale short story that first made his name

The Innocents Abroad (1869)

Comic travel book about a pleasure cruise to Europe and the Holy Land; his bestselling book in his lifetime

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873)

Satire co-written with Charles Dudley Warner that gave its name to the era of post-Civil War greed

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)

Boyhood adventures in St. Petersburg on the Mississippi, including the whitewashed fence

The Prince and the Pauper (1881)

The young Edward VI swaps places with a lookalike London beggar boy

Life on the Mississippi (1883)

Memoir of his years as an apprentice and pilot on Mississippi steamboats

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884 (UK); 1885 (US))

Huck and the runaway slave Jim flee down the Mississippi on a raft, narrated in Huck's vernacular

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)

A 19th-century engineer is transported to Camelot and satirises chivalry and superstition

Key ideas

  • Adventures of Huckleberry Finn made colloquial American speech a literary language
  • Satire of slavery, racism, religious hypocrisy and, later, American and European imperialism
  • Hemingway wrote that all modern American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn

Quick-fire facts

  • •'Mark twain' was the leadsman's call for a depth of two fathoms (12 feet), safe water for a steamboat
  • •Born in Florida, Missouri; grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, the model for St. Petersburg
  • •Born two weeks after Halley's Comet's perihelion in 1835 and predicted he would go out with it; he died in 1910, the day after its next perihelion
  • •After a newspaper reported him gravely ill or dead in 1897, he remarked that the report of his death was an exaggeration
  • •His publishing firm, Charles L. Webster and Company, published Ulysses S. Grant's Personal Memoirs
  • •Received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1907
  • •Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) turns on the use of fingerprints to solve a murder
  • •The Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Prize for American Humor is named after him
  • •Died at his house, Stormfield, in Redding, Connecticut

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Sources