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(This is a test effort. The text is copyrighted, I took it from Biography.com. This
will not be the final version of the text I use.)
Writer, journalist, lecturer; born in Florida, Mo. Growing up along
the Mississippi River, he left school at age 12 and worked as a printer (1847--57),
then as a Mississippi riverboat pilot 1857--61). In 1863 he took as his pen name the call
used when sounding the river shallows, "Mark twain!" referring to two fathoms. In 1861,
after a few unhappy weeks as a Confederate volunteer, he went to Nevada where he tried
gold mining and then edited a newspaper. In 1864 he went to San Francisco as a reporter
and achieved his first success with "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"
(1865). In 1866 he visited the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) on a newspaper assignment and
his articles gained him some reputation, which in turn launched his career as a lecturer.
In 1867 he took a trip to Europe and the Holy Land, and his humorous description of his
experiences in The Innocents Abroad (1869) broadened his reputation; he would repeat its
success with later travel books: Roughing It (1872); A Tramp Abroad (1880); and Life on
the Mississippi (1883). On his return to America in 1867, he settled in the East,
marrying Olivia Langdon, daughter of a wealthy New York coal merchant (1870); they had
four children. In 1871 he moved to Hartford, Conn., and built a distinctive house (now
open to the public) at the center of a community of artists known as Nook Farm. He
collaborated with one of them, Charles Dudley Warner, on a novel satirizing post-Civil
War America, The Gilded Age 1873). He won wide popularity with The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1882), and A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court (1889), but it was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884, England;
1885, U.S.A.) that eventually became regarded as a seminal work of American literature.
Poor investments wiped out most of his earnings by 1894, but a world lecture tour and
sales of his books restored some of his wealth. Beneath his humor there had always been
a layer of disillusion and pessimism; the loss of two daughters 1896, 1909) and his
wife (1904) hardened this attitude, expressed in such works as What is Man? (1906) and
The Mysterious Stranger (1916). In his final years he was greatly honored especially in
England) and his opinions on everything were sought out by the public, but the
posthumous publication of his autobiography (1924) revealed the dim, indeed dark view
he held of his fellow humans.
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When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so
ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to
be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
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-Mark Twain
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I have made it a rule never to smoke more than
one cigar at a time.
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-Mark Twain
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To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever
did. I ought to know because I've done it a thousand times.
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-Mark Twain
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Man--a creature made at the end of the week's
work when God was tired.
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-Mark Twain
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If you pick up a starving dog and make him
prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between
a man and a dog.
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-Mark Twain
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I have never let my schooling interfere with
my education.
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-Mark Twain
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I would like to live in Manchester, England.
The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable.
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-Mark Twain
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Go to Heaven for the
climate, Hell for the company.
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-Mark Twain
(cf. HEAVEN : Machiavelli)
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Of the delights of this world, man cares most
for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven.
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-Mark Twain
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Life does not consist mainly, or even
largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of
thought that is forever flowing through one's head.
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-Mark Twain
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There is something fascinating about
science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such
a trifling investment of fact. |
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-Mark Twain
Life on the Mississippi
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Life does not consist mainly, or even
largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of
thought that is forever flowing through one's head.
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-Mark Twain
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I think I think, therefore I think I am.
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-Mark Twain
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Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction?
Fiction, after all, has to make sense.
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-Mark Twain
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Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.
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-Mark Twain
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Always tell the truth. That way, you don't
have to remember what you said.
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-Mark Twain
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