Mark Twain's Life

Known around the world for such books as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, his works have lasted for generations. Much of his early life and travels through the country can be seen in the things about which he wrote, from his jobs to his loss of family. Mark Twain's stories were influenced by both his early and later life, and it was these experiences that made him a renowned and famous writer.

Mark Twain was born under the name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, to John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton Clemens. He was born two months premature and was thin and sickly. However, on the night that he was born, Halley's comet appeared in the sky and gave his parents hope that it might be a good omen.

However, his health was just one of his parent's worries. John Marshall Clemens was a merchant and a lawyer. Many times he moved westward with his growing family betting that one frontier settlement and then another would flourish and he along with it. He had managed to buy seventy thousand acres in Tennessee, a good sized land area, even at that time. He hoped that one day he would be able to sell this land and make himself rich, but he never was able to sell it.

Samuel's early life was not boring, as he had five other siblings (a sixth was yet to come). However, his big family did not stay big for long. When he was only four years old, his sister Margaret died. Three years later, his brother Benjamin died. Soon after the death of Margaret, the Clemens family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, partly because Sam's father did not want to be in the city of so much sadness to him. Hannibal was said to have been the basis for many parts of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Because Hannibal was in Missouri during the mid- 1800s, Mark Twain saw slavery first hand and used the things that he saw as more material for his books.

One of Sam's closest boyhood friends, Tom Blankenship, was the son of the town drunkard. Many times Sam would leave his house in the middle of the night by slipping out his bedroom window to spend a night with Tom. Often, he skipped church and the evening night services, which were akin to punishments for him.

Sam also had very vivid memories of slaves. "In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. The local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind."

Samuel Clemens had many friends who were slaves. Most notably among them was "Uncle Dan", a tall man of over six feet and in his forties. Samuel used him as his inspiration for a multitude of characters in his books, such as the character Jim in the novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. However, there were also other slaves from whom he drew his ideas. There was the family's house slave Jennie, a household boy named Sandy, and their cook.

In early 1847, when Samuel was only eleven years old, his father became ill with pneumonia and died. Because the family did not have a source of income, Samuel's mother began to take in borders in their house, his sister gave piano lessons, and he worked as an errand boy, grocery clerk, and even for a short while as a blacksmith apprentice in between his years of school. However, he eventually left school and went to work at the

At sixteen, he began working as a typesetter and wrote articles and funny stores for the local newspaper, the Hannibal Journal. The paper happened to be owned by his brother Orion (this may have accounted for some of the ease of him getting the job since not many sixteen year olds were honored enough to be printed). His brother was said to be as "unstable as water" and could never seem to hold onto an idea for more than a day. Samuel was never payed the money that he was owed, but was rewarded with the experience of writing articles and making funny sketches under the pen-name of W. Epaminondas Adrasus Blab.

Sam began traveling the country to different towns like St. Louis, New York, and Cincinnati and working in the papers there as a printer at only seventeen years of age. After four years though, he went back to Missouri. He boarded a ship that was bound for New Orleans and had the ambition of going to Brazil and making a fortune in trading cocoa beans, one of the many get rich quick schemes that he would try in his life.