Memorable Quotations: Mark Twain

Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, (1835–1910) was one of the greatest authors of American literature. After leaving Hannibal, Missouri, where he worked as a printer, he became a Mississippi River pilot (1857). He moved west in 1862 and began writing for newspapers, initially in Virginia City, Nevada, then in San Francisco, choosing as a penname a phrase from his river pilot days, “Mark Twain.” He first gained recognition with his funny tale “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865). Following a trip to Hawaii (1866), he became a popular humorous lecturer and, after a visit to the Holy Land, he published The Innocents Abroad (1869). In 1870 he married and settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where he produced some of his best work: The Gilded Age (1873), a satirical novel written with Charles Dudley Warner; The Prince and the Pauper (1882), a children's novel; the nonfictional Life on the Mississippi (1883); the satire A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889); and the two celebrated evocations of his childhood, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). In Huckleberry Finn, generally considered his masterpiece, Twain invented one of the most unforgettable characters in American literature, portrayed an authentic picture of 19th-century life, and transformed the language of fiction through his use of colloquial speech. In 1893, plummeted into debt, he lectured his way around the globe, chronicling his experiences in Following the Equator (1897). His later years were distressed by the deaths of two daughters and his wife, and his later works, e.g., The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899), What Is Man? (1905), The Mysterious Stranger (1916), are sad, cynical, and pessimistic.