Mark Twain

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835 to 1910), the American humorist and novelist who wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

He was born on 30 November 1835 in Florida, Missouri, and grew up in Hannibal on the Mississippi. He worked as a printer and typesetter, then as a Mississippi riverboat pilot, before turning to journalism in Nevada, where he first used the name Mark Twain while writing for the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City. He died on 21 April 1910 at his house, Stormfield, in Redding, Connecticut.

His travel book The Innocents Abroad (1869) made his name. From 1874 to 1891 he lived in a house on Farmington Avenue in Hartford, Connecticut, where he produced much of his best-known work: Roughing It (1872), The Gilded Age (1873, with Charles Dudley Warner), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). Several first editions came from the American Publishing Company of Hartford, and in 1884 he set up Charles L. Webster and Company with his nephew by marriage, Charles L. Webster; Huckleberry Finn was its first book.

For collectors. For his two best-known novels the London edition came first. Tom Sawyer was published, without illustrations, by Chatto & Windus in June 1876, ahead of the illustrated American Publishing Company edition of December 1876. Huckleberry Finn appeared from Chatto & Windus in the UK and Canada on 10 December 1884, two months before the American edition from Charles L. Webster on 18 February 1885. In the American first edition, an unidentified engraver altered the plate of E. W. Kemble's picture of Silas Phelps on page 283 to add an indecent detail; around 30,000 copies had been printed before it was spotted and a new plate made.