Clemens

Clemens, SAMUEL LANGHORNE ('Mark Twain'), an American humorist, was born at Florida, Missouri, November 30, Copyright 1889 in U.S. 1835. He learned the trade of a printer, and afterwards acted as a pilot on the Mississippi River. From a well-known call of the man sounding the river in shallow places ('Mark twain,' meaning 'by the mark two fathoms') his pseudonym as a writer was subsequently taken. After the outbreak of the war of 1861–65; he went to Nevada, where he tried silver-mining; next he edited for two years the Virginia City Enterprise, to which he had previously contributed as 'Mark Twain'; and in 1864 moving to San Francisco, became a journalist, and lectured with success there and in New York. In 1867 he joined a pleasure party going abroad, and visited France, Italy, and Palestine, gathering material for his Innocents Abroad (1869), which established his reputation as a humorist, 125,000 copies selling within three years. He was afterwards an editor at Buffalo, New York, with an interest in the Express, where he married Miss Langdon, a lady of wealth. He, later, removed to Hartford, Connecticut. His books have been mostly sold by subscription, and have yielded him a large income. He is a member of the publishing firm of Charles L. Webster & Co. He was made M.A. of Yale in 1888. His humour, however grotesque, is never laboured, never mean or ungenerous; it is singularly direct and simple in form, and has appealed as successfully to British as to American readers. 'If the prevailing spirit of Mark Twain's humour,' writes Mr Howells, 'is not a sort of good-natured self-satire, in which the reader may see his own absurdities reflected, I scarcely should be able to determine it.' Mr Clemens has varied much of his work by excellent character-sketches and graphic descriptions. Among his books are The Innocents Abroad (1869); Roughing It (1872); The Gilded Age (1873), the last written with the co-operation of Mr Charles Dudley Warner, and published both as a story and as a comedy, in which shape it had great success; Tom Sawyer (1876); A Tramp Abroad (1880); The Prince and the Pauper (1882); Life on the Mississippi (1874, re-issued 1883); The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885); a compilation, Library of Humour (1888); Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894); Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896); Huckleberry Finn as Detective (1897). The author lost all his money in a publishing enterprise (1884–95), and in 1898 wrote an autobiography.