Mark Twain

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, an American author, journalist and lecturer born in Missouri in 1835. He worked as a printer, riverboat pilot, miner and newspaper correspondent before establishing himself as one of the most distinctive voices in American literature. His experiences along the Mississippi River and in the expanding American West provided material for fiction and travel writing marked by humour, sharp observation and criticism of social hypocrisy.

Twain is best known for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. His novels explore childhood, race, slavery, class and national identity, often using satire to expose injustice and pretension. Although much of his work was contemporary when written, it now offers a vivid portrayal of nineteenth-century America, particularly the antebellum South, the Mississippi River and the social changes that followed the Civil War. Twain died in Connecticut in 1910.