Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, in the small Missouri town of Florissant, sixth son of John and Jane Clemens.

Early Life Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the tiny village of Florida, Missouri, the sixth child of John and Jane Clemens.

 He was an American humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist, best known internationally for his Mark Twain travelogues, particularly The Innocents Abroad

 (1869), Roughing it (1872), and Life on the Mississippi (1883), as well as for his boyhood adventure stories, particularly The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Library of Congress > Research Department > Latino Reading Room > World 1898 Home > Literature from the Spanish-American War > Mark Twain, particularly The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1883), and for his adventure stories about boyhood, particularly The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1883), as well as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Library of Congress > Research Department > World 1898 Home > Literature from the Spanish-American War Literature of the Spanish-American War Literature of 1898>

Mark Twain 1835-1985.

 Mark Twain, writer, adventurer, and astute social critic born Samuel Clemens, wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At 34, Mark Twain became one of the country’s most beloved and celebrated writers. As his writings became more and more popular, Mark Twain became a social activist and an iconic American, and his works represented some of the best of the realistic genre. This was the first known usage of the pseudonym by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a few others adopted pseudonym usage (Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, & Quintius Curtius Snodgrass, among others) followed before he adopted, for good, the pen name Mark Twain.

Mark Twain’s real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, and he took his pen name from his days as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River, where yelling mark twain signified water depth–about 12 feet was required to safely navigate the riverboats. Samuel Clemens himself responded to the prompt, saying, His pen name was the nom de plume of a certain Captain Isiah Sellers, who once wrote the news on rivers above the Mississippi for the New Orleans Picayune. In 1902, 

Mark Twain visited the University of Missouri, Columbia, and donated to the society a twenty-two-volume collection of his collected works. Letters From The Land was published as a book by that title, together with other formerly unpublished works, in 1962, and reinvigorated the public interest in the serious works of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. In 1839, his family moved into his Hill Street house, which is now Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, featuring its famed whitewashed picket fence, in the booming port town of Hannibal, Missouri.