Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper: A Radio Dramatization Audiobook

About the Authors

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.

M. J. Elliot is the author of numerous radio dramatizations, including the Vincent Price series and the Father Brown audio dramas.

About Jerry Robbins

Jerry Robbins is an American actor and singer who has performed in more than one hundred stage productions, including an acclaimed portrayal of John Barrymore in William Luces’ play, Barrymore. He has also written and produced forty radio plays with his company, the Colonial Radio Theatre on the Air, winning the Parents Choice Award for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 2001 and an Audio Worlds Golden Headset Award for Little Big Horn in 1999.