

Bixby took Twain on as a cub pilot to teach him the river between New Orleans and St. actually know where these things are in the dark". The pilot had to "get up a warm personal acquaintanceship with every old snag and one-limbed cottonwood and every obscure wood pile that ornaments the banks of this river for twelve hundred miles and more than that, must. The pilot, even in those days of trivial wages, had a princely salary – from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and no board to pay." As Twain described it, the pilot's prestige exceeded that of the captain. Twain describes his boyhood in Life on the Mississippi, stating that "there was but one permanent ambition" among his comrades: to be a steamboatman. He educated himself in public libraries in the evenings, finding wider information than at a conventional school. Louis, and Cincinnati, joining the newly formed International Typographical Union, the printers trade union. When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. In 1851, he began working as a typesetter, contributing articles and humorous sketches to the Hannibal Journal, a newspaper that Orion owned. The following year, Twain left school after the fifth grade to become a printer's apprentice. His father was an attorney and judge who died of pneumonia in 1847, when Twain was 11.

Slavery was legal in Missouri at the time, and it became a theme in these writings. When he was four, Twain's family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a port town on the Mississippi River that inspired the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. His brother Pleasant Hannibal (1828) died at three weeks of age, his sister Margaret (1830–1839) when Twain was three, and his brother Benjamin (1832–1842) three years later. Twain was of Cornish, English, and Scots-Irish descent. His parents met when his father moved to Missouri. He was the sixth of seven children of Jane ( née Lampton 1803–1890), a native of Kentucky, and John Marshall Clemens (1798–1847), a native of Virginia. Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. Twain was born shortly after an appearance of Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would "go out with it" as well, dying the day after the comet made its closest approach to Earth. He eventually paid all his creditors in full, even though his bankruptcy relieved him of having to do so. He filed for bankruptcy in the wake of these financial setbacks, but in time overcame his financial troubles with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers. Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures but invested in ventures that lost most of it-such as the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter that failed because of its complexity and imprecision. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty. The short story brought international attention and was even translated into French. His humorous story " The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was published in 1865, based on a story that he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, where he had spent some time as a miner. He referred humorously to his lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He served an apprenticeship with a printer and then worked as a typesetter, contributing articles to the newspaper of his older brother Orion Clemens. Twain was raised in Hannibal, Missouri, which later provided the setting for Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the latter of which has often been called the " Great American Novel". He was lauded as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced", and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature".

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer.
