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Mark Twain
(November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910) U.S.A.

Mark Twain

Writer, journalist and humorist

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Mark Twain is the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who was born in Florida, Missouri, of a Virginian family. He was brought up in Hannibal, Missouri. After his father's death in 1847, he was apprenticed to a printer and wrote for his brother's newspaper. He later worked as a licensed Mississippi river-boat pilot.

The Civil War put an end to the steamboat traffic and Clemens moved to Virginia City, where he edited the Territorial Enterprise. On February 3, 1863, "Mark Twain" was born when Clemens signed a humorous travel account with that pseudonym.

In 1864 Twain left for California, and worked in San Francisco as a reporter. He visited Hawaii as a correspondent for The Sacramento Union, publishing letters on his trip and giving lectures. He set out on a world tour, traveling in France and Italy. His experiences were recorded in 1869 in The Innocents Abroad, which gained him wide popularity, and poked fun at both American and European prejudices and manners.

Mark TwainThe success as a writer gave Twain enough financial security to marry Olivia Langdon in 1870. They moved next year to Hartford. Twain continued to lecture in the United States and England. Between 1876 and 1884 he published several masterpieces, Tom Sawyer (1881) and The Prince And The Pauper (1881). Life On The Mississippi appeared in 1883 and Huckleberry Finn in 1884.

In the 1890s Twain lost most of his earnings in financial speculations and in the failure of his own publishing firm. To recover from the bankruptcy, he started a world lecture tour, during which one of his daughters died. Twain toured New Zealand, Australia, India, and South Africa. He wrote such books as The Tragedy Of Pudd'head Wilson (1884), Personal Recollections Of Joan Of Arc (1885), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and the travel book Following The Equator (1897). During his long writing career, Twain also produced a considerable number of essays.

The death of his wife and his second daughter darkened the author's later years, which is seen in his posthumously published autobiography (1924).

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Mark Twain

"My research for a biography of Samuel Langhorne Clemens brought Byatt's novel Possession to mind, especially when I came across a series of odd notes, letters, newspaper squibs, and coincidences concerning Mark Twain's years as a reporter in Nevada and California. These bits and pieces were not virgin material, of which very little remains in Twain scholarship. But though I found almost everything in secondary sources, to me these disparate fragments told a new story. I saw them as evidence - circumstantial, but incontestable; inconclusive, but suggestive - that Clemens had a series of strong, loving, and romantic relationships with other men." p.23-24.

"Merely suggesting the possibility of Clemens's homosexual experience has provoked debate and, in some cases, personal attack. One cannot alter the visage of an icon without retribution. People both in and outside academia have sprung to the defense of Mark Twain's reputation, treating my hypothesis about his sexuality as though it were an attack on his character." p.25.

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Source: Hoffman, Andrew J., "Mark Twain and homosexuality". in American literature. 67(1): 23-49, March 1995.

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