Mark Twain. Photograph, A. F. Bradley, 1907. Public domain.
Mark Twain
Mark Twain (1835–1910) was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a Missouri riverboat pilot who became a newspaperman, a lecturer and a novelist. He wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and he opened every chapter of Pudd'nhead Wilson with a one-line saying.
Words We Carry
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“When in doubt, tell the truth.”
Following the Equator, Chapter II (1897)
“Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”
The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, Chapter XV — “The Robber Robbed” (1894)
“When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.”
The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, Chapter X — “The Nymph Revealed” (1894)
About Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. His family moved to Hannibal, a river town on the Mississippi, when he was four.
Before he wrote for a living, he piloted steamboats, until the Civil War shut down river traffic in 1861. “Mark twain” was the leadsman’s call for two fathoms, twelve feet of water, deep enough to pass. He first signed the name in Nevada’s Territorial Enterprise on February 3, 1863.
He married Olivia Langdon in 1870. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer came out in 1876, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884.
In April 1894 he filed for bankruptcy, after heavy losses on a typesetting machine and on his own publishing house. The law no longer required him to repay his creditors. He lectured his way around the world from July 1895 to July 1896, wrote Following the Equator about the trip, and had repaid them by 1898.
He died at his home in Redding, Connecticut, on April 21, 1910.
The Work
From the Journal
