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Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Missouri in 1835. Early in his childhood, the family moved to Hannibal, Missouri - a town which would provide the inspiration for St Petersburg in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. When he started writing in earnest in his thirties, he adopted the pseudonym Mark Twain (the cry of a Mississippi boatman taking depth measurements, meaning 'two fathoms'), and a string of highly successful publications followed. His later life, however, was marked by personal tragedy and sadness, as well as financial difficulty. In 1894, several businesses in which he had invested failed, and he was declared bankrupt. Over the next fifteen years he saw the deaths of two of his beloved daughters, and his wife. Increasingly bitter and depressed, Twain died in 1910, aged seventy-five.
Twain was surely the American Dickens, however much he would have hated the phrase-and however high a tribute it seems today -- Ellen Moers * New York Review of Books * Twain was ahead of his time. He was one of America's first modern celebrities, an icon of the first age of mass media -- Ben Tarnoff * New Yorker * Twain's great virtue as a writer, his genius, was his deliberate refusal of borrowed propriety or scale. The tallest of tales could be fashioned from the most modest of ingredients -- Tim Adams * Guardian *
