The machine had great potential but it failed in the market due to frequent breakdowns. He lost a great deal of his writing profits and much of his wife’s inheritance on different investments, the costliest was his backing of a promising typesetting machine. While Twain’s career as a writer enriched him, his turn as a gentleman investor did much to impoverish him. Children may also enjoy reading Mark Twain: A Child's Biography. When he failed to strike it rich, he turned to journalism and it was during that time that he wrote the short story that would launch his career, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County - a story that captivated me when read out loud by one of my teachers in elementary school. He started his career as a typesetter at a newspaper, worked as a printer, a riverboat pilot, and then turned to gold mining.

Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri and would later use that location as the setting for two of his most famous works, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. As the young country grew in size but not in a cultural manner to the liking of the European gentry, it became fashionable to criticize 'the ugly American.” Twain famously travelled abroad and disarmed his audience with his wit and humor with pronouncements like the following: “In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.” As his writing grew in popularity, he became a public figure and iconic American whose work represents some of the best in the genre of Realism. Mark Twain was a talented writer, speaker and humorist whose own personality shined through his work.

His real name was Samuel Longhorne Clemens, and he took his pen name from his days as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River where the cry “mark twain” signaled the depth of water - about 12 feet was required for the safe passage of riverboats. Pen Name: Mark Twain Born: NovemDied: April 21, 1910īorn Novemin Florida, Mark Twain “came in with the comet” and as he predicted 'went out with the comet” passing April 21, 1910, the day after Halley’s Comet.

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