The Life of Mark Twain

Called “The Father of American Literature” by William Faulkner, Mark Twain was the one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century and realized the accomplishment of the American Dream that has eluded so many other authors. “He was America 's greatest humorist, yet he ended up mankind 's darkest cynic and most savage critic”(Otfinoski). Mark Twain stands out as one of the most impactful writers of his time and depicted the America that he knew with his literature and with his life.

Mark Twain became one of the greatest and wealthiest writers of his time but was originally born under the name Samuel Langhorne Clemens to a poor family in Florida, Missouri. He was born two months premature under the light of Halley’s Comet, a sign of good things to come and was sickly for the first ten years of his life. Soon after his birth, his father decided to move to the river town of Hannibal, Missouri where Mark Twain spent much of his childhood. While living in Hannibal, Twain became infatuated with the riverboats that came through and the men who piloted them. Though this town was small and bleak and he suffered many hardships here, he always remembered it with fondness in his writings; “Perhaps it was the romantic visionary in him that caused Clemens to recall his youth in Hannibal with such fondness”(Mark Twain). Of these hardships probably the greatest for him would have been the loss of his father at age twelve which caused him to have to drop out