Samuel Clemens Accomplishments

Years prior to taking up the pen name Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens was raised in Hannibal, Missouri. In his lifetime, Clemens experienced America’s growth and change. From the westward expansion to industrialization, the end of slavery, foreign war, and many advancements in technology. (House). It‘s not for no reason that Samuel Clemens’ legacy continues to live on over a century after he passed. Although Clemens was a well-known public speaker, author, and humorist, he was a serious advocate for education, literacy, abolition of slavery, freedom of speech, and social-political reform. Samuel Clemens’s writing on 19th-century life greatly impacted American literature and even awarded him names such as “the father of American literature”.

From twelve to eighteen years of age, Clemens worked as an apprentice typesetter for different newspaper companies in Hannibal (Concise Dictionary). This led Sam to eventually become an assistant to his brother, Orion. Orion had purchased a local newspaper but was unable to achieve success as a Journalist. Alongside all of Orion’s failures, Samuel had picked up “that brand of frontier humor called the humor of the Old Southwest,” (Concise Dictionary). With this newfound sense of humor, Samuel created his first comic story, “The Dandy Frightening the Squatter,”. This comic landed itself in the Carpet-Bag, a section of a weekly newspaper, in May of 1852. Only a year later, Samuel Clemens finally decided to fly solo. From 1853 to 1857, Clemens traveled to St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, and Keokuk, Iowa, and briefly lived in Cincinnati (St. James). In April of 1857, Samuel boarded a ship called the Paul Jones which was headed for New Orleans (Concise Dictionary). On board this ship, the pilot took on Clemens as a cub pilot. For the next two years, Samuel held the same occupation as the cub pilot until eventually got his license in 1859. From 1861 to 1865, Union forces blockaded the Mississippi river making travel for steamboats and other river trade difficult. As a result of this Samuel’s career as a steamboat pilot came to an