In 1839, Samuel Clemens and his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a port along the banks of the Mississippi River. As a young child, Clemens was not a healthy boy but by the time he was nine years old, he regained his health and spent a lot of time outdoors with his friends. His most famous works are about boyhood in a town on the Mississippi River.
Samuel Clemens attended school until the fifth grade. When Clemens was 13, his father passed away. The boy's first job was in a printing shop as a printer's apprentice. Two years later, he became a newspaper and editorial assistant for his brother's newspaper, the Hannibal Journal, where he discovered his knack for writing.
When Clemens was 17 years old, he took a printer's job in St. Louis, where he became a river pilot's apprentice; his eventual pseudonym, Mark Twain, is a river term that means "two fathoms deep." In 1862 he became a reporter in Virginia City, Nevada, and in 1863 he began signing his articles as Mark Twain.
The river trade came to an end due to the Civil War, so Clemens began working as a newspaper reporter for several newspapers. He gained popularity when the New York Saturday Press published his story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County" in November 1865. In 1869, his first book, "The Innocents Abroad," was published.
Mark Twain is most famous for two of his novels, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (1876) and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1884), which is considered Twain's masterpiece. These books are still read by today by students and general readers. Throughout his life, Mark Twain wrote 28 books, plus numerous short stories and letters.
In 1870, when Clemens was 35 years old, he married Olivia Langdon. They live in Hartford, Connecticut, and had four children. Only one of their daughters, Clara, bore them a granddaughter. Their granddaughter, however, died without having any children, so Samuel Clemens has no futher direct descendents.
Twain became a celebrity in his later years and frequently spoke out on public issues. In 1907, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford. Mark Twain passed away on April 21, 1910, at age 75.