Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born November 30, 1835, and is now most popularly known as famous author Mark Twain. He was born two weeks after the closest approach to Earth of Halley's Comet.

Throughout his life, Mark Twain underwent experiences that would later contribute to his writing. He worked as a riverboat pilot from 1857 to 1861, something that he hints at throughout his stories. Mark Twain grew up around a lot of racism, lynch mobs, and even hangings. This made him weary to unfair treatment of the blacks, though Mark Twain is often thought to be racist himself, ironically.

He also worked as a gold-miner in a gap between his writing career, confessing that “I would not have been made more or less human if I had not gone mad like the rest.” He is referring to the rest of his fellow gold-miners, people who often went mad from their labor.

Mark Twain's writing is characterized by its broad levels of humor and sarcasm, as well as biting social satire. Some would comment on Mark Twain's keen wit. He has excellent use of dialect, something you'll see frequently in his writing. The emotion in Mark Twain's works is often more of an undercurrent with a sometimes blasé tone to it. The actual content is full of adventure, trouble, and hardships faced. The use of irony is sometimes present as well. His style could be described as full of humor, wit, and unique dialect.

One of the major keys to Mark Twain's success was his sense of humor, as well as the fact that he was one of the first, if not the first, to use proper amounts of dialect. Mark Twain was talented at rendering colloquial speech and helped to create and popularize a distinctive American literature built on American themes and language.

After much trouble deciding, Mark Twain stated that his most famous books were to be children novels, though at first they were thought to be written for adults. This decision may have something to do with the death of Mark Twain's two daughters, honoring them with the genre for children. This decision would later cause much of Mark Twain's popularity. Twain believed that, although he enjoyed his fame and popularity, he lacked the analytical sensibility needed as an author.

Mark Twain died April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut, one day after Halley's Comet approached the earth. He quoted before his death that “I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said so, no doubt: Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.” His predictions ended up being quite correct.

After his death Mark Twain was quoted as the “greatest American humorist of his age”, and William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American literature.”