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.