Mark Twain
1835–1910 · American (Missouri/Connecticut) · Gilded Age America
Known for: America's greatest humorist—Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, master of satire
Samuel Clemens, known as Mark Twain, was a riverboat pilot, gold prospector, journalist, lecturer, and the most famous American of his time. He was a brilliant storyteller, a devastating satirist, and a hopeless businessman who lost a fortune on a typesetting machine.
His humor masked increasingly bitter pessimism—his later works are savagely nihilistic. He was anti-imperialist, anti-religious, and anti-fraud. He dressed entirely in white, smoked 40 cigars a day, and was born when Halley's Comet appeared and died when it returned, as he had predicted. Hemingway said 'All modern American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn.'
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