Get a 6-day Overview of Mark Twain's Life, as written by Mark Twain's authorized biographer!

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, and later moved with his family to Hannibal, Missouri, where he grew up.

Twain's Hannibal, Missouri home.

Although he had a number of odd jobs early in his life, Clemens is best known as a writer who took the pen name of Mark Twain about five years after he published his first major work.

Twain was a traveling journalist, humorist, writer, and lecturer whose most famous novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

His childhood in Hannibal along the Mississippi River inspired colorful tales of adventures on the waterway.

Twain traveled around the world and he dazzled audiences far and wide with lectures filled with the same humor and spirit found in his writings.

Mark Twain's real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

Before Clemens became well known as a writer, he held a variety of odd jobs including piloting a steamboat up and down the Mississippi River.

He was licensed as a steamboat pilot in 1859 and worked on the river until fighting there during the Civil War ended traffic traveling from north to south.

His experiences along the river helped him come up with his pen name.

Do you know how he chose his name?

This name comes from something shouted by crewmen on a boat. To test the depth of the water, a crewman shouts "mark twain!" The crewman is calling for two fathoms, or a depth of 12 feet, which is barely enough for a boat to navigate safely.

"Twain" is an old-fashioned way of saying "two" and a fathom is six feet.

"Mark Twain" is a "pen name" in the same way that many people in show business use a "stage name." Do you know of any famous people who don't use their real name?

(Think of Sting, Bono, Mohammed Ali, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, or John Wayne)

He went out west and visited mining camps and he went to San Francisco, where he sharpened his skill at ridiculing local officials for their incompetence, dishonesty and failure to help the citizens who most needed assistance.

This kind of writing, humor alternating with serious fact, became Mark Twain's trademark style and made him and his pen name famous around the world.