mall town that was sufficient material for a budding writer. His father died during the year 1847 and shortly after the death of his father his went for schooling to become a printer's apprentice. Between 1853 and 1857 he worked as a journeyman printer. A series of sketches, "The Snodgrass Letters," signed Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, were published in the Keokuk Post in 1856 and 1857. These showed that Clemens, like many other humorists of the 1850s, was fond of using misspellings, and puns for humorous effects. The trip during which he wrote these letters
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