Mark Twain

Mark Twain was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, as Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Mark Twain was just a pen name acquired from a river boat. On river boats, one member of the crew always stood near the railing measuring the depth of the water with a long cord which had flags spaced six feet apart. When the crewman saw the flags disappear he would call out "Mark One!" for one fathom and for two fathoms he called out "Mark Twain!" Two fathoms meant safe clearance for river boats, so Sam Clemens chose a name which not only recalled his life on the river but which also had a reassuring "all's well" meaning.

The beginning of his life was unpromising. His family was a good one but its circumstances were reduced and its environment was discouraging. His father, John Marshall Clemens, a lawyer by profession and a merchant by vocation, had brought his family to Florida from Jamestown, Tennessee, like the manner of Judge Hawkins in The Gilded Age. Florida was a small town then, a vi

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He was dirty, uneducated, and lived without authority. Many of the characters in the book were based on real people in Hannibal that Clemens knew growing up. (Magill, 1991, P 1954)

The child was puny, and did not make a very sturdy fight for life.

In 1853 Twain decided to see the world. He established a small business there, and located his family in the humble frame cottage where, five months later, was born a baby boy to whom they gave the name of Samuel, a family name, and added Langhorne, after an old Virginia friend of his father. A still younger brother, Henry, entered the office as an apprentice. By and by he went to Philadelphia, where he worked a brief time. Twain incorporated passages from other books on the river when he discovered he didn't have enough material to fill out the book; he also included a portion from his unfinished Huckleberry Finn manuscript. Steamboats landed at the prosperous town three times a day, and Twains' boyhood dream was to become a Steam-Boatman on the river. (Trachtenberg, 1988, P 526)

He remained with Ament until his brother Orion bought out a small paper in Hannibal in 1850. Still he weathered along, season after season, and survived two stronger children, Margaret and Benjamin. The real life Laura Hawkins was the inspiration for Becky Thatcher. llage of twenty-one houses located on Salt River, but Judge Clemens, as he was usually called, believed in its future. The little boy Sam, at twelve, was apprenticed to a printer named Ament.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is about the adventures faced by a boy named Huckleberry Finn and Jim, a runaway slave, as they travel down the Mississippi River on a raft.

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Approximate Word count = 1136
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

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