Sketching Mark Twain´s biography

Mark Twain wrote numerous books, made speeches and established a local-color literature describing his time and region like nobody else…

When he was four, Twain's family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a port town on the Mississippi River that inspired the fictional town of St. Petersburg in “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. Missouri was a slave state and young Twain became familiar with the institution of slavery, a theme he would later explore in his writing.

Twain headed west. Twain and his brother traveled more than two weeks on a stagecoach across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, visiting the Mormon community in Salt Lake City. The experiences inspired “Roughing It” and provided material for “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”. Twain's journey ended in the silver-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, where he became a miner. Twain failed as a miner and worked at a Virginia City newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise. Here he first used his pen name.

His first success as a writer came when his humorous tall tale, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," was published in a New York weekly, The Saturday Press, on November 18, 1865.

During his tour of Europe and the Middle East, he wrote a popular collection of travel letters, which were later compiled as “The Innocents Abroad” in 1869.

Twain on the cover of Vanity Fair, 1908

During his seventeen years in Hartford (1874–1891) and over twenty summers at Quarry Farm, Twain wrote many of his classic novels, among them “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (1876), “The Prince and the Pauper” (1881), “Life on the Mississippi” (1883), “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (1885) and “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court” (1889).

Twain made a second tour of Europe, described in the 1880 book “A Tramp Abroad”.

Twain embarked on a year-long, around-the-world lecture tour in July 1895 to pay off his creditors in full, although he was no longer under any legal obligation to do so. It would be a long, arduous journey and he was sick much of the time, mostly from a cold and a carbuncle. The itinerary took him to Hawaii, Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, India, Mauritius, South Africa and England. Twain's three months in India became the centerpiece of his 712-page book “Following the Equator”.

We are in front of a man, a renaissance man, who did it all. He was a writer, an adventurer, a soldier and a traveler. Among other things, and most importantly, he lived a full life. He experienced slavery, stagecoach travelling, the Mormons, the Pony Express, the first railroads.

Few people can say, as Mark Twain did, that he experienced the rise of a nation and influenced in its creation.

Censorship

Twain's works have been subjected to censorship efforts. According to Stuart (2013) "Leading these banning campaigns, generally, were religious organizations or individuals in positions of influence – not so much working librarians, who had been instilled with that American "library spirit" which honored intellectual freedom (within bounds of course). In 1905, the Brooklyn Public Library banned both The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer from the children's department because of their language.

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