Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in 1835, in the state of Missouri. When he was four, his family moved to the town of Hannibal, Missouri. Hannibal was a port on the Missippi River, and Clemens loved to watch the big steamboats going up and down the river. He said that all the boys in his school had one ambition in life: to work on a steamboat!
His father died when he was just 12 years old, and Clemens then went to work for a printer to help support his family. He travelled around, and worked in many different cities. But when he was 22, he achieved his ambition—he got a job working on a steamboat. He sailed up and down the wide Missippi River until the American Civil War began.
He then moved around America, and tried several jobs. He was a soldier, and a silver miner. Then he started working as a writer for a newspaper. It was at that time that he decided to use a pen name for his stories, and he chose the name "Mark Twain".
The name is interesting. It comes from his days on the steamboats. He used to throw a piece of rope into the river. There was a heavy weight on the end of the rope, and the rope had some marks on it. He used the rope to find how deep the river was. Then he shouted out, "Mark One" or "Mark Twain", meaning "Mark Two". Each mark was about two metres, so when he shouted "Mark Twain", it meant that the river was deep enough for the big boat.
In 1865 Clemens wrote a story about a jumping frog. The story and the writer became famous. In 1867 he toured Europe. He married when he returned, and lived for most of the rest of his in Harfort, Connecticut. He wrote many books, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which he wrote in 1876. He also gave many lectures, and became a very famous and popular man.
Once two of his friends decided to write to him, but they had lost his address. So on the envelope they just wrote "Mark Twain, God knows where". Several weeks later, they received a replay from the writer. It just said, "He does!"
Samuel Clemens died in 1910. He is considered to be one of America's most important writers.
