Mark Twain's

Mark Twain's real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Born in 1835 in Missouri, USA he gew up in Hannibal, a small town on the Mississippi River.When his tether died in 1847, Samuel left school to start work as a printer. At the age of 20, he began work on the Mississippi riverboats, and became a riverboat pilot. After the Civil War began in 1861, the riverboats stopped running, and Clemens tried many different jobs. He also started writing humorous stories tor various newspapers, and before later he was well known as a writer. He wrote his first major book in 1869, and got married a year later. He published Tom Sawyer in 1876 and Huckleberry Finn in 1884.He was still famous and very popular, both in the USA and Europe, at the time of his death in 1910.


Huckleberry Finn is set in about 1845-1850, and begins in a small town just like Hannibal. In other words, Mark Twain was writing about the time and place of his own childhood. Many of the characters and events in the story are taken from his boyhood and his life as a riverboat pilot.