Huck Finn
John Holton
Mrs. Maxey
English
Huckleberry Finn Assignment #1
A. Mark Twain’s real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemons, and was born on November 30, 1835. He was original born in Florida, Missouri, but when he was the age of 4 he moved with his family to Hannibal, a small town on the Mississippi River. Mississippi was a slave state at the time and Samuel Clemons became very familiar with the slavery institution and incorporated it into his writings later on. At the age of 12 he became a printer’s apprentice, and in 1851 he started working for the Hannibal Journal. He left Hannibal at the age of 18 and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. On a trip down the Mississippi the steam boat captain, Horace E. Bixby, inspired Twain to pursue a career as a steamboat pilot. Twain had his brother work with him on a steamboat when he was a caption. However when a steamboat he was working on exploded, it killed his brother. Twain felt guilty for the rest of his life. He finally retired from a steamboat caption when the Civil War broke out in 1861.
Mark Twain’s first book was The Innocents Abroad in 1869. It was a book about his travels in Europe. More of Twain’s recollections and tall tales from his frontier adventures were published in his book, Roughing It. It was in 1873 that Twain’s writing turned toward social criticism. Together with Charles Dudley Warner, they wrote The Gilded Age, which attacked the political corruption, big business and the American obsession with getting rich that seemed to dominate the era. For the next 17 yrs. Twain completed some of his most famous works, including: he Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), and his most famous work Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Twain published other books later in life. Some of the more famous ones were The...
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