Publisher Description
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in 1835 and is far better known by his pen name, Mark Twain. An American author and humorist of the first order, he is perhaps most famous for his novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, written in 1876, and its sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, written in 1885 and often described with that mythic moniker "the Great American Novel." Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which would later provide the backdrop for these great novels.
Apprenticed to a printer, he eventually became a master riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River. Later, heading west with his brother Orion to make his fortune, he failed at gold mining and instead turned to journalism and found his true calling as a writer of humorous stories. This volume celebrates some of these shorter stories. His wit and humor sparkle from every page, his craft evident with every phase and punctured target.
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About Mark Twain
Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel L. Clemens (1835–1910), was born in Florida, Missouri, and grew up in Hannibal on the west bank of the Mississippi River. He attended school briefly and then at age thirteen became a full-time apprentice to a local printer. When his older brother Orion established the Hannibal Journal, Samuel became a compositor for that paper and then, for a time, an itinerant printer. With a commission to write comic travel letters, he traveled down the Mississippi. Smitten with the riverboat life, he signed on as an apprentice to a steamboat pilot. After 1859, he became a licensed pilot, but two years later the Civil War put an end to the steam-boat traffic.
In 1861, he and his brother traveled to the Nevada Territory where Samuel became a writer for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, and there, on February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous account with the pseudonym Mark Twain. The name was a river man’s term for water “two fathoms deep” and thus just barely safe for navigation.
In 1870 Twain married and moved with his wife to Hartford, Connecticut. He became a highly successful lecturer in the United States and England, and he continued to write.
About Stuart Milligan
Stuart Milligan voiced Colonel Stark in the Doctor Who television story “Dreamland,” Anthony Chambers in the
Big Finish Doctor Who audio story “The
Reaping,” Emerson Whytecrag III in “Lurkers at Sunlight’s Edge,” and Garundel
in “Black and White.” He played Richard Nixon in the Doctor Who television stories “The Impossible Astronaut” and “Day
of the Moon.” He also read the AudioGO audiobook Blackout.