Biography

 Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens; Florida, USA, 1835 - Redding, id., 1910) American writer. Tireless adventurer, he found in his own life the inspiration for his literary works. He grew up in Hannibal, a small riverside town on the Mississippi. At the age of twelve he lost his father, dropped out of school and entered a publishing house as an apprentice typographer, at the same time that he began to write his first journalistic articles in newsrooms in Philadelphia and Saint Louis.

At the age of eighteen, he decided to leave his home and begin his travels in search of adventure and, above all, fortune. He worked as a typographer for a time in his region, then headed to New Orleans; On the way he enrolled as an apprentice pilot of a river steamer, a profession that excited him and that he held for a time, until the Civil War of 1861 interrupted river traffic, ending his career as a pilot.

Later he headed west to the mountains of Nevada, where he worked in the primitive mining camps. His desire to make a fortune led him to search for gold, without much success, so he was forced to work as a journalist, writing articles that quickly took on a personal style. His first literary success came in 1865, with the short story The Famous Jumping Frog of Calaveras, which appeared in a newspaper already signed under the pseudonym of Mark Twain, the pilots' technical name meaning "mark two probes." As a journalist, he traveled to San Francisco, where he met the writer Bret Harte, who encouraged him to pursue his literary career. He then began a stage of continuous travel, as a journalist and lecturer, which took him to Polynesia and Europe, and whose experiences he recounted in the travel book The Innocents Abroad (1869), which was followed by A la brega (1872), in the one who recreates his adventures in the West.

After marrying Olivia Langdon in 1870, he settled in Connecticut. Six years later he published the first novel that would make him famous, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, based on his childhood on the banks of the Mississippi. He had previously written a novel in collaboration with C. D. Warner, The Golden Age (1873), considered quite mediocre. However, his literary talent was fully displayed with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1882), a work also set on the banks of the Mississippi, although not as autobiographical as Tom Sawyer, and which is undoubtedly his masterpiece, and even one of the most highlights of American literature, for which he has been considered the American Dickens. Also noteworthy is Life on the Mississippi (1883), a work that, more than a novel, is a splendid evocation of the South, not without criticism, as a result of his work as a pilot.

With a popular style, full of humor, Mark Twain contrasts in these works the idealized world of childhood, innocent and at the same time mischievous, with a disenchanted conception of the adult man, the man of the industrial age, of the "golden age" that followed the civil war, deluded by morality and civilization. In his later works, however, the sense of humor and the freshness of the childhood world evoked give way to an increasingly evident pessimism and bitterness, although expressed with irony and sarcasm. A series of personal misfortunes, including the death of one of his daughters and his wife, as well as a serious financial loss, overshadowed the last years of his life. In one of his last works, The Mysterious Stranger, he stated that he felt like a supernatural visitor, arrived with Halley's Comet, and that he had to leave Earth with the comet's next reappearance, as it actually happened.