11/17/2023
/ Mark Twain /
"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced", and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature". His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the latter of which has often been called the "Great American Novel". Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and Pudd'nhead Wilson, and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today with Charles Dudley Warner. Twain was raised in Hannibal, Missouri, which later provided the setting for Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. 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 later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada.
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Born: Samuel Langhorne Clemens, November 30, 1835, Florida, Missouri, U.S.
Died: April 21, 1910, Stormfield House, Redding, Connecticut, U.S.
Resting place: Woodlawn Cemetery, Elmira, New York, U.S.
Occupation: Writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, lecturer
Language: American English
Period: Modern
Genre: Adventure fiction, speculative fiction, travelogue, opinion journalism, literary criticism, polemic, essay, autobiography, correspondence, oration
Literary movement: American Realism
Years active: from 1863
Mark Twain (2010). “Mark Twain's Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review”, p.43, Univ of Wisconsin Press