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From Routledge’s “Men of the Time.”

CLEMENS, Samuel Langhorne, better known by his nom-de-plume of “Mark Twain,” an American humorous writer, born in Florida, Monroe County, Missouri, Nov. 30, 1835. He lost his father when twelve years of age, and his early advantages of education were but meagre. Soon after his father’s death he apprenticed himself to a printer, with whom he remained three years, striving to improve his education meanwhile, and then started upon his travels, supporting himself by his trade. At the age of seventeen he resolved to become a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi river, and, having “learned the river” between St. Louis and New Orleans (1,375 miles), he followed that occupation till he was twenty-four years old. An elder brother, having been appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Nevada Territory, offered him the position of private secretary, which he accepted for a few months, but soon abandoned it for mining life, in which he was eventually unsuccessful. He had written occasionally for the Virginia City Enterprise, the principal newspaper of the Territory, and about 1862 was offered the position of local editor. He first adopted the nom-de-plume of “Mark Twain” (an allusion to his former pilot life), in the columns of this paper. About 1864 he was offered an editorial position on a San Francisco journal. He remained there two years, writing, in addition to his editorials, occasional sketches for literary periodicals, some of which were extensively copied. In 1866 he went to the Sandwich Islands to write up the sugar interest there for a California paper. On his return he commenced lecturing in California and Nevada. Some of his sketches having attracted attention in the eastern periodicals, he sailed for New York in the spring of 1867, and published a small volume of these sketches, entitled “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras, and other Sketches,” which sold well in the United States, and was republished in England by Messrs. Routledge & Sons. He was one of the party who made an extended European and Oriental pleasure excursion in the steamship Quaker City in 1867, and on his return went to California, and wrote there “The Innocents Abroad; or, the New Pilgrim’s Progress.”

His later books, and dates of publication, are as follows: “Roughing It,” 1871; “The Gilded Age” (by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner), 1873; “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” 1876; “Sketches,” 1877; “A Tramp Abroad,” 1880. The six books have sold, in the United States, in the aggregate, 495,000 copies. American publishers, The American Publishing Co., Hartford; English publishers, Chatto & Windus, London; Continental publisher, Tauchnitz, Leipzig.