Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who wrote as Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, and lecturer. Raised in the Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri, he worked as a printer, a riverboat pilot, and a journalist in the Nevada Territory and California before national fame arrived with his travel writing and fiction. His novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn drew on his boyhood along the river and became central to the American literary canon. He also produced travel narratives, satire, and essays, and lectured widely. After an early editorial stint in Buffalo, New York, he spent his most productive years in Hartford, Connecticut, then lived abroad in Europe for much of the 1890s before returning to New York City and finally settling at Stormfield in Redding, Connecticut.