Publisher Description
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910), better known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. Twain is most noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Compiled and performed by James Carroll Jordan, this is an entertaining take on Mark Twain's early writing. Taking inspiration from Roughing It, Twain's semi-autobiographical travelogue, Jordan presents the story much as Mark Twain may have done himself in his days on the lecture circuit in the 19th century.
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"Enjoyed reading this non-fiction Twain book. Laughed out loud at several points. Some parts about silver mining got a little dry, but still fascinating to see early West history through Twain's eyes when he was just starting out writing.
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Rllk4 (4 out of 5 stars)
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.