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1835 – 1910 · Florida
Mark Twain
How Sam Clemens of Hannibal became Mark Twain, and gave America its truest voice.
About
Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born in 1835 in Missouri. He grew up in Hannibal, a town on the Mississippi River, and the river shaped almost everything he wrote. As a young man he trained as a steamboat pilot, which is where he found his pen name: "mark twain" was a river call meaning the water was safe to pass. When the Civil War stopped river traffic he drifted west and tried mining, then turned to newspaper writing instead.
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