Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
Excerpt from the editor\s preface:
The derivation of the pen name, Mark Twain, from a pilot's call while making soundings on the Mississippi indicates Samuel Clemens' devotion to the river of his youth. To it, and the boats and personalities it bore, America's world-renowned writer owed a lifelong allegiance.
His participation in the river's colorful life and his love of its own brand of humor provided the background for those stories which have forever made the world richer. Beginning with his early humorous works of the pioneering adventure,
Mark Twain developed a career without parallel in American letters and extended it in his later, deeply earnest The Mysterious Stranger and his reverent Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. Samuel Clemens was bom in Florida, Mo., on November 30, 1835. At the age of four, he was taken to Hannibal, Mo., where his father died four years later. Thrust upon the world, the boy learned to set type, and very early in life became a journal printer.
After working in various cities in the Middle West and East, he left his trade when he was sixteen years old to become a Mississippi River pilot. During the Civil War, he prospected for gold in Nevada and voyaged to the Sandwich Islands.
From a post on the Virginia City Enterprise, he went to San Francisco and found a welcome there among a circle of writers that included Bret Harte, Artemus Ward, and others.
The story that brought him early national fame was The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. His first book, Innocents Abroad, followed a trip to the Mediterranean and the Orient; then his name was made on both sides of the Atlantic. At this time he was settled in the East, living in Elmira, N. Y. Subsequently he moved to Hartford, Conn., where he made his home for many years. In 1875, he published his most famous book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; its sequel,
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appeared in 1882. By this time a highly successful author, Mark Twain ventured into the book-publishing business by buying a major interest in the firm of Charles L. Webster and Company. One of his first editorial contributions — ^his persuasion of General Ulysses S. Grant to write his memoirs — made a fortune for his company and for the Grant family. A disastrous investment in a crude typesetting machine ^wiped out all of Mark Twain^s money and saddled him with debts. Years of writing and lecturing went to pay off his obligations. By the turn of the century, the slate was clean. He took up residence in New York City, where he became a beloved and familiar figure dressed entirely in white. In 1906, he moved to a coimtry home in Redding, Conn., and there he died on April 2, 1910.
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