Mark Twain author page

Mark Twain biography

Mark Twain, the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was an American author and humourist. He is best known for writing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Twain began his literary career as a typesetter and contributed articles to his brother’s newspaper. He gained national attention with the short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” published in 1865.

Twain’s works often drew on his experiences growing up along the Mississippi River. In addition to his most famous novels, he wrote The Prince and the Pauper (1881), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894). His writing is noted for its wit, social criticism, and use of regional dialect.

Twain lectured extensively in the United States and abroad. He received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Yale University in 1888 and from Oxford University in 1907. Twain’s influence on American literature has been widely acknowledged, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is frequently cited as a major work in the literary canon.

His final completed novel, The Mysterious Stranger, was published posthumously in 1916.