Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, the sixth child of John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton Clemens; he was born two months prematurely.⁠[1][2]

He was born in a very small two-room house that is now preserved inside the museum of the Mark Twain Birthplace State Historic Site in Missouri. The family lived there only until a larger home was finished in 1836. Twain later wrote: “Heretofore I have always stated it was a palace.”⁠[1]

In 1839 the Clemens family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a port town on the Mississippi River, where he spent his childhood.⁠[1][2]

He spent boyhood summers at his uncle’s farm; his uncle owned several enslaved people, and his father owned one.⁠[3]

In 1847 his father, John Clemens, died of pneumonia.⁠[2][3]

After his father’s death he left school to work as a printer’s apprentice; in 1848 he was apprenticed at Joseph P. Ament’s Missouri Courier.⁠[3][2]

In 1851 he edited the Hannibal Journal while its owner and editor, his brother Orion Clemens, was away, wrote local items for the paper, and sent two sketches to the Saturday Evening Post in Philadelphia.⁠[4]

At 18 he went east to New York City and Philadelphia, working on several newspapers. In 1856 and 1857 he wrote letters from Cincinnati for the Keokuk Saturday Post in Iowa, signed “Snodgrass.”⁠[3][4]

In 1857 he returned to the Mississippi to train as a steamboat pilot under Horace Bixby. On September 9, 1858, he obtained his license as a Mississippi River pilot, and Bixby took him on as a full partner.⁠[3][4]

In May 1859 he published a burlesque of river notes by the veteran pilot Isaiah Sellers in the New Orleans True Delta; in Life on the Mississippi he called it his first newspaper article and wrote that it had hurt Sellers.⁠[4][5]

The Civil War halted river traffic in 1861. He joined the Confederate-aligned Marion Rangers and quit after two weeks.⁠[3]

In July 1861, after his brother Orion Clemens was appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory, he travelled west with him by stagecoach. He failed as a silver prospector and began writing for the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City; in 1862 he contributed pieces signed “Josh” and from August became the paper’s local news reporter.⁠[3][4]

The signature “Mark Twain” first appeared on a letter from Carson City dated February 2, 1863, and from then on it was attached to all of his work. He explained to Territorial Enterprise editor Joseph Goodman that it was a leadsman’s call meaning two fathoms, or twelve feet: “it meant safe water.”⁠[4]

In Life on the Mississippi (1883) he wrote that Isaiah Sellers had signed river notes for the New Orleans Picayune “Mark Twain,” and that when news of Sellers’s death reached him he needed a nom de guerre, “so I confiscated the ancient mariner’s discarded one.”⁠[5]

In 1864 he moved to San Francisco, where he worked as a local reporter for the San Francisco Call, wrote for the Golden Era and the Californian, and sent daily letters to the Territorial Enterprise.⁠[3][4]

On November 18, 1865, his Jumping Frog story appeared in the Saturday Press in New York and was then reprinted in newspapers across the country.⁠[4][3]

In 1866 the Sacramento Union sent him to the Sandwich Islands, now Hawaii; his reports led to his first lecture tour, and on October 2 that year he lectured on the Sandwich Islands in San Francisco.⁠[3][4]

In 1867 he arrived in New York City to write for the Alta California. On May 1 that year his first book, The Jumping Frog, was published by Charles Henry Webb.⁠[3][4]

That year he joined the Quaker City steamship excursion to Europe and the “Holy Land,” writing travel letters for the Alta California and the New York Tribune. On the voyage, fellow passenger Charles Langdon showed him a picture of his sister, Olivia Langdon.⁠[3][4]

On July 20, 1869, The Innocents Abroad, based on those travel letters, was published by the American Publishing Company. The same year he bought a one-third interest in the Buffalo Express.⁠[4][3]

In February 1870, after a two-year courtship, he married Olivia Langdon; the couple settled in Buffalo, New York, where he was a partner, editor and writer at the Buffalo Express.⁠[3][4]

In 1871 the family moved to Hartford, Connecticut, renting a house in Nook Farm. Roughing It, an account of his years in the West, was published in February 1872; that year the couple’s first son died at the age of two.⁠[3][4]

In December 1873 The Gilded Age, a novel satirizing political corruption and greed that he wrote with Charles Dudley Warner, was published.⁠[3][4]

In 1874 the family’s 25-room house on Farmington Avenue in Hartford was completed; they lived there for 17 years and often spent summers at the farm of Olivia’s sister in Elmira, New York, where he wrote several of his books at Quarry Farm.⁠[3][4]

From January to July 1875 he serialized Old Times on the Mississippi, recalling his piloting years, in the Atlantic. In December 1876 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published by the American Publishing Company.⁠[4]

A Tramp Abroad followed in March 1880, The PrinceThe PrinceThe Prince (Il Principe) is a political treatise written by the Florentine political thinker Niccolò Machiavelli between late 1513 and 1514 and published posthumously in 1532. In 26 chapters it discusses the types of principalities, how power is acquired and maintained, armies and the qualities a prince should have. Its argument that a prince may set aside traditional morality to maintain his state has provoked lasting controversy in Europe since the sixteenth century, and in 1559 it was placed on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books.Open the full entry and the Pauper in December 1881, and Life on the Mississippi in May 1883.⁠[4]

In 1884 he went into publishing with Charles L. Webster, forming Charles L. Webster & Co., which published Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in December that year.⁠[4][3]

The novel opens with a notice: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”⁠[6]

In Chapter 31, Huck decides not to betray the runaway Jim and tears up the letter he has written, saying: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”⁠[6]

In 1885 he signed a contract with Ulysses S. Grant to publish Grant’s memoirs, which became a financial success. In 1888 he received a Master of Arts degree from Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry. In December 1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was published by the Webster firm.⁠[3][4]

In 1890 he was occupied chiefly with promoting the Paige typesetting machine. In 1891, under financial strain from bad investments, the family moved to Europe.⁠[4][3]

On April 18, 1894, Charles L. Webster & Co. executed assignment papers and closed its doors. At the creditors’ meeting that followed, Henry H. Rogers represented him.⁠[4]

In November 1894 Pudd’nhead Wilson was published in book form by the American Publishing Company. Its chapters open with maxims from “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar,” including: “Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”⁠[4][7]

On July 14, 1895, he began a lecture tour at Elmira, travelling first across North America and then around the world, including Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa, to earn money to pay his debts.⁠[4][8][3]

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc was serialized anonymously in Harper’s Magazine in 1895–96 and published as a book in May 1896.⁠[8][4]

In 1896 his eldest daughter died, aged 24, while visiting the Hartford house; the family never again lived in Hartford.⁠[3]

Following the Equator, describing the world tour, was published in November 1897. Chapter 15 opens with a maxim from “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar”: “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”⁠[4][9]

In 1898, with revenue from the tour, the book and investments made for him by Henry H. Rogers, he paid his creditors in full.⁠[8]

In June 1897 the New York Herald carried a story that he was gravely ill and possibly dying in London. When journalist Frank Marshall White came to check, Twain said the report probably arose because his cousin James Ross Clemens had been seriously ill in London. On June 2, 1897, the New York Journal printed his reply: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”⁠[10]

The more widely circulated form, “Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,” comes from later retellings; modifiers such as “greatly” and “grossly” were added over the following years.⁠[10]

In 1900 he returned to the United States with his finances restored and declared himself an anti-imperialist; he also gave a sharply sarcastic introduction of Winston ChurchillWinston ChurchillSir Winston Churchill (1874–1965) was a British Conservative statesman and writer who served as Prime Minister in 1940–1945 and 1951–1955, led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953.Open the full entry. From 1901 until his death he was a vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League. In February 1901 he published “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” in the North American Review.⁠[3][4]

In 1901 Yale University awarded him a Doctor of Letters degree; in June 1902 the University of Missouri gave him an honorary Doctor of Laws, and on that trip he made his last visit to Hannibal to see old friends.⁠[4][8]

In 1903 the family moved to Italy, where his wife, Olivia, died on June 5, 1904.⁠[3][8]

In 1905 he published King Leopold’s Soliloquy, a pamphlet attacking Belgian King Leopold II’s rule in the Congo. In 1906 What Is Man? was privately printed and issued anonymously.⁠[8][4]

In 1906 he dictated his autobiography in New York and in Dublin, New Hampshire; selections appeared in the North American Review in 1906–07. On April 19 that year he gave a farewell lecture at Carnegie Hall.⁠[4][8]

On June 26, 1907, the University of OxfordUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university in Oxford, England, where teaching existed in some form by 1096; it describes itself as the oldest university in the English-speaking world and is organised as a federal system of the university and dozens of self-governing colleges.Open the full entry conferred an honorary Doctor of Letters on him at a ceremony in the Sheldonian Theatre; others honoured that morning included Rudyard Kipling, Auguste Rodin, Camille Saint-Saëns and Prime Minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Of all his honours, it was the one he most coveted.⁠[4][8]

In June 1908 he moved into his new house in Redding, Connecticut, named “Stormfield” at his daughter’s suggestion. On December 24, 1909, his youngest daughter died.⁠[8]

In 1909 he said to his biographer Albert Bigelow Paine: “I came in with Halley’s comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it.”⁠[4]

In January 1910 he travelled to Bermuda; in early April he suffered severe chest pains and returned to Stormfield with Paine. He died there at about half past six in the evening on April 21, 1910, aged 74.⁠[8][4][2]

A service was held for him at the Brick Church in New York, where Henry van Dyke spoke; he was then buried in the family plot in Elmira, New York. Only one of his daughters survived him.⁠[4][8]

To mark the 100th anniversary of his death in 2010, the University of California Press published Volume 1 of the Autobiography of Mark Twain, edited by Harriet E. Smith and Robert Hirst.⁠[11]

The saying “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled” is often credited to Mark Twain, but there is no substantive evidence that he wrote or said it. The earliest close match found is a tweet of January 10, 2011, that attributed the line to Twain.⁠[12]

Twain expressed a related idea in autobiographical remarks dictated in December 1906 and published in the North American Review in January 1907: “How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!” Earlier sayings on the same theme include Norman Angell’s “it is easier to bamboozle than to debamboozle” in The Public Mind (1927).⁠[12]

A variant, “It is easier to con a man than to convince him he has been conned,” is likewise not Twain’s: he avoided the term “confidence man” in his published writing, and no versions of the line have been found before 2016; a possible earlier source is a 1913 remark by W. L. Baldridge, editor of the Dexter Dispatch in Kansas, though this remains a surmise.⁠[13]

The Mark Twain House & Museum: Official website: https://marktwainhouse.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]

Center for Mark Twain Studies: Official website: https://marktwainstudies.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[13]