Here is an excerpt from an article by Elizabeth Nix for the History Channel. To read the complete article and countless others, please click here.
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Check out eight fascinating facts about the world-famous author, including why his riverboat career was marred by tragedy and who served as the real-life model for Huck Finn.
[Here are the first four.]
1. As a baby, he wasn’t expected to live.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born two months prematurely on November 30, 1835, in tiny Florida, Missouri, and remained sickly and frail until he was 7 years old. Clemens was the sixth of seven children, only three of whom survived to adulthood. In 1839, Clemens’ father, John Marshall, a self-educated lawyer who ran a general store, moved his family to the town of Hannibal, Missouri, in search of better business opportunities. (Decades later, his son would set his popular novels “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in a fictionalized version of Hannibal.) John Marshall Clemens became a justice of the peace in Hannibal but struggled financially. When Samuel Clemens was 11, his 49-year-old father died of pneumonia.
2. Twain’s formal education was limited.
In 1848, the year after his father’s death, Clemens went to work full-time as an apprentice printer at a newspaper in Hannibal. In 1851, he moved over to a typesetting job at a local paper owned by his older brother, Orion, and eventually penned a handful of short, satirical items for the publication. In 1853, 17-year-old Clemens left Hannibal and spent the next several years living in places such as New York City, Philadelphia and Keokuk, Iowa, and working as a printer.
3. His career as a riverboat pilot was marred by tragedy.
In 1857, Clemens became an apprentice steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River. The following year, while employed on a boat called the Pennsylvania, he got his younger brother, Henry, a job aboard the vessel. Samuel Clemens worked on the Pennsylvania until early June. Then, on June 13, disaster struck when the Pennsylvania, traveling near Memphis, experienced a deadly boiler explosion; among those who perished as a result was 19-year-old Henry. Samuel Clemens was devastated by the incident but got his pilot’s license in 1859. He worked on steamboats until the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, when commercial traffic along the Mississippi was halted. Clemens’ pen name, Mark Twain, comes from a term signifying two fathoms (12 feet), a safe depth of water for steamboats.
4. Twain briefly served with a Confederate militia.
In June 1861, shortly after the Civil War began, 25-year-old Clemens joined the Marion Rangers, a pro-Confederate militia. Although his family had owned a slave when he was a boy, Clemens didn’t have strong ideological convictions about the war and probably enlisted with the militia primarily out of loyalty to his Southern roots. His time with the group turned out to be brief: After two weeks of conducting drills, the poorly supplied Marion Rangers disbanded upon hearing a rumor that a Union force—led by Ulysses Grant, as Clemens eventually learned—was headed their way. The following month, Clemens left Missouri and the war behind and journeyed west with his brother Orion, who had been named the territorial secretary of Nevada. Once there, Clemens tried his hand at silver mining and then, after failing to strike it rich, took a job as a reporter with a Virginia City, Nevada, newspaper in the fall of 1862. The following February, he used the pen name Mark Twain for the first time. Prior to that, he had tried out other pseudonyms, including W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab and Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass.
As it happened, later in life Clemens became friends with Ulysses Grant, and in 1885 published the former president’s memoir, which became a best-seller and rescued Grant’s widow from poverty after her husband lost most of their money to bad investments.
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Here is a direct link to the complete article.
Your may also wish to check Pat Hingle’s brilliant performance in this YouTube film of Mark Twain Tonight!
It is generally believed that Ron Powers wrote the best biography of Twain. Here’s a link to it.