The much-admired writer Mark Twain was born in a small frontier settlement in Missouri and grew up in Hannibal, Missouri.

Hannibal was a quiet town on the banks of the Mississippi but the town became lively when a riverboat appeared.

Like many young boys, Twain admired the riverboat pilots and longed to become one someday.

The pilot always had to be aware of the depth of the water for riverboats could get stuck in shallow water.

Twain’s real name was Samuel Clemens but he is best known by his pen name.

Riverboat workers called out “mark twain” when the water was two fathoms (12 feet) deep and a pilot hearing this call knew that the water was safe to cross.

Twain had several jobs but he started out as an apprentice to a printer, his older brother.

Twain didn’t always get along with his brother but he did learn the printing trade.

Twain then took a series of printing jobs in different parts of the country and he also began to write humorous stories.

In 1857 he began an apprenticeship as a riverboat pilot and his experiences on the river led him to write a series of sketches called Life on the Mississippi.

Twain tried to become a silver prospector in Nevada and there he experienced the “wild” West.

He did not strike it rich as a prospector yet he did find rich subject matter for his novel Roughing It.

Next, he headed for San Francisco and took a job as a newspaper reporter and met other western writers.

One of Twain’s most famous stories was written there in 1865 and is about a jumping frog.

Twain’s stories made people laugh but the stories often had a serious point.

He might satirize the excesses of the very rich or he might point out human cruelty and injustice.

Mark Twain and writer Charles Dudley Warner both thought the emphasis on making money after the Civil War was causing people to neglect democratic ideals and they named these years the “Gilded Age.”

The novel Huckleberry Finn is an adventure story about how a boy and a runaway slave search for freedom but it is also a story about friendship.

Tom Sawyer is a book that many readers enjoy for it paints a charming picture of the simple pleasures of boyhood in a Mississippi river town.

Twain had a wide experience of America and Americans and this experience is reflected in his novels.

Twain also had an ear for dialects and he was the first great writer to use this everyday speech of Americans in novels and stories.

In his later life, Twain took a very dark view of human nature and his pessimism is reflected in works such as The Mysterious Stranger.

Mark Twain was born in a year in which Halley’s comet was visible from Earth and he predicted that his death would coincide with the comet’s return.

Halley’s comet returns to Earth about every seventy-six years and it did so in 1910, the year of Mark Twain’s death.

I have not yet read Twain’s Tom Sawyer nor A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.