Mark Twain

Samuel Clemens was born on 30 November 1835 in Florida, Missouri, the sixth of seven children. His family moved to Hannibal, on the Mississippi, when he was 4. His father died in 1847; at 11 he left school to become a printer's apprentice at a local newspaper, setting its stories in type. He went on to work for several papers in New York and Philadelphia, then became a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi.

The Civil War stopped river traffic in 1861. He went west to Nevada with his brother Orion, failed as a silver prospector and joined the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City. A letter from Carson City, printed on 3 February 1863, was probably the first piece he signed "Mark Twain", the boatmen's call for water two fathoms deep.

His first book came out in New York in the spring of 1867. Charles Henry Webb, whom he had known in San Francisco, suggested a volume of sketches; Clemens chose and revised twenty-seven of them, and the collection appeared as The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches. He was 31. Away on his travels, he never read the proofs, and later complained to Bret Harte about the errors of grammar and spelling left in the text.

The story that would make him famous began as a missed commission. The humorist Artemus Ward asked him for a piece for his travel book, but the request reached him late; on 26 February 1865 Clemens noted that he ought to have had it three months earlier. The manuscript, most likely sent by steamer, reached New York after the volume had closed.

The 1867 collection also began with a refusal. In the account Twain dictated in 1906, the publisher George W. Carleton turned the book down; Webb then decided to publish it himself and offered him a 10 per cent royalty. For The Innocents Abroad, Elisha Bliss of the American Publishing Company in Hartford offered him either a 5 per cent royalty or $10,000 in cash on delivery of the manuscript. He took the royalty. The October 1868 contract promised copies "very early next spring"; the copyright was not registered until 28 July 1869. Twain later said the company's directors were afraid of the book's humour, a story the editors of the Mark Twain Project treat with caution.

The next book, Roughing It, fought him too. From September 1870 to March 1871 he barely moved forward, and in March he wrote: "In three whole months I have hardly written a page."

He heard the story in the winter of 1864-65 in the mining camps of California. Around 6 February he jotted one line in his notebook: a man named Coleman, his jumping frog, a $50 bet with a stranger. Back in San Francisco he wrote it up, probably in a few days in mid-October 1865. "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" appeared on 18 November 1865 in the New York Saturday Press, edited by Henry Clapp. He was 29.

A correspondent wrote from New York that the sketch had "set all New York in a roar", and within about three weeks it was reprinted everywhere. Clemens was rather embarrassed, writing to his family that New Yorkers had singled out "a villainous backwoods sketch" to praise him for. He later said he would have been glad to get $10 or $15 for it.

The rest came quickly. In 1866 the Sacramento Union sent him to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii), and his letters were popular enough to launch his first lecture tour. In 1867 he sailed on the Quaker City to Europe and the Holy Land, sending more than fifty letters to the papers. Revised, they became The Innocents Abroad, sold by subscription from August 1869. It earned him nearly $14,000 in its first year and was his first bestseller.

Twain did most of his writing in summer. For more than twenty summers the family stayed at Quarry Farm, near Elmira, New York, with his wife's sister Susan Crane, where he had uninterrupted time to write. In 1874 Susan and Theodore Crane surprised him with a small octagonal study, built on a knoll about a hundred yards from the house, above the Chemung River valley. There he wrote major parts of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

Huckleberry Finn shows how he worked. He began it in the summer of 1876, and by 9 August he reported 400 pages done. Then he stopped mid-scene, said he might "pigeonhole or burn" it, came back to it briefly in 1880 and only finished it in the summer of 1883 at Quarry Farm, writing about 3,000 words a day, up to 4,000, and never under 2,600 on a working day. He kept four or five books going at once, let a manuscript rest when his "tank" ran dry and went back once it had filled; by that method, he said, a book took seven years.

From Life on the Mississippi on, he had his manuscripts typed, which made revising easier. In the 1890s rheumatism in his right hand made him try writing with his left, and then dictate more. From 1906 to 1909 he dictated most of his autobiography, and embargoed it so that he could speak his mind without hurting his heirs' income.

On 2 February 1870, in Elmira, he married Olivia Langdon, whose portrait Charles Langdon had shown him aboard the Quaker City. After a spell in Buffalo, where he was part owner and editor of the Express, the family moved in 1871 to Hartford, Connecticut, and from 1874 to 1891 lived in the 25-room house on Farmington Avenue. They had four children: Langdon, who died as a baby, Susy, Clara and Jean.

In 1884 he founded his own publishing house, Charles L. Webster and Company, whose first book was Huckleberry Finn, and the next year he published General Grant's memoirs. Bad investments in inventions ruined him; the family moved to Europe in 1891 to cut costs, the publishing house failed in 1894, and he set out on a lecture tour around the world to pay his debts. Susy died in 1896, Olivia in 1904, Jean in 1909. Having moved to Stormfield, in Redding, in 1908, he died there on 21 April 1910, aged 74. He is buried in Elmira, in the Langdon-Clemens plot at Woodlawn Cemetery.