History of Florida, (Monroe County) Missouri United States of America

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Samuel Langhorne ("Mark Twain") Clemens, author, was born in Florida, Mo. Nov. 30, 1835; son of John Marshall and Jane Lampton (Lambton) Clemens. Removing to Hannibal Mo., he attended school there till 1847, when his father died and he worked in the printing office of his brother Orion, 1847-53. He journeyed to Philadelphia and New York in 1853; worked in St. Louis, Muscatine and Keokuk, 1851-57; was a pilot on a steamboat plying between St. Louis and New Orleans, 1857-61; second lieutenant in the Confederate army two weeks in 1861, and joining his brother Orion, who had been appointed secretary of the territory of Nevada, he became his assistant and afterward engaged in mining. In 1862 he accepted the city editorship of the Enterprise of Virginia City, Nev. Sent to Carson to report the proceedings of the legislature, he signed his letters, "Mark Twain," a familiar call from the leadsman to the pilot of every Mississippi steamboat. In 1864 he was for a time reporter on the Morning Call, San Francisco, Cal., and afterward became a placer miner in Calaveras county. He soon, however, returned to his more congenial work in San Francisco. His disposition for travel carried him to the Sandwich Islands in 1866, and he spent six months at Hawaii, writing up the sugar industries of the islands. Finding there little to encourage him in the way of permanent business, he returned to California and began his vocation as a humorous lecturer, his first audiences being the miners of that state and Nevada. He went to New York in 1867 and there published his "Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras." The same year he joined a party of tourists in an excursion on the Quaker City to the old world, and on his return went to California, where he wrote out his experiences in book form under the title, "The Innocents Abroad." The book had a phenomenal success. It took the reading public by storm and passed into American literature as a standard humorous work. He then became editor of the Express, Buffalo, N.Y. He was married in 1870 to Olivia L. Langdon of Elmira, N.Y., and in 1871 settled in Hartford. Conn. He was in constant demand as a platform lecturer and magazine correspondent. In 1872 he went to Europe on a lecturing tour and in 1884 established in New York city the publishing house of C. L. Webster & Co., which firm assumed the publication of his works. In 1885 they brought out the "Memoirs of General Grant," which had the largest circulation of any popular subscription book up to that time, paying to Mrs. Grant a copyright of $350,000. In 1893 the firm failed and Mr. Clemens was obliged to return to his pen and the lecture platform to recover his fallen fortunes. He succeeded so well that in 1898 he had liquidated the entire indebtedness of the firm. In 1895-96 he made the tour of the world, under direction of a lecture bureau, and in 1896 went to London, where he wrote "Following the Equator." His works have all been republished in England, the earlier ones without his sanction, and many of them have been translated into German and French. Among his works are The Innocents Abroad (1869); Roughing It (1872); The Gilded Age (with C. D. Warner, 1873); Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876); Punch Brothers, Punch (1878); A Tramp Abroad (1880); The Stolen White Elephant (1882); The Prince and the Pauper (1882); Life on the Mississippi (1883); Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885); A Library of Humor (1888); A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889); The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, and the Comedy, Those Extraordinary Twins (1894); Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896); How to tell a Story, and Other Essays (1897); Following the Equator (1898). In 1899, a uniform edition of his works was published.

From: Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans, Johnson, Rossiter, editor

History of Florida, (Monroe County) Missouri

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