Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, in the ""almost invisible"" village of Florida, Missouri-then the border of the American frontier (Miller 2). "Mark Twain" was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, one of the major authors of American fiction (World 528). He had a wide spread of family in his life including a mother, a father, a sister, three brothers, a wife, a son, and three daughters (Waisman OL). Twain was considered the greatest humorist in American literature (World 528). .
"Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, on Nov. 30, 1835, the sixth child of John and Jane Clemens." Several years later, in 1839, the family moved (Waisman OL). At seven in the morning, he arrived in Hannibal, Missouri, where his boyhood was going to be spent (Twain 428). "At the age of 13 he became a full-time apprentice to a local printer. He became a delivery boy, grocery clerk, and blacksmith's helper during summers or after school" (Gwinn 75). "Like many American authors of his day, Twain had little formal education. Instead of attending high school and college, he gained his education in print shops and newspaper offices. When his brother Orion, 10 years older than he, established the Hannibal Journal, Samuel became a compositor for that paper. Since Orion was as poor a businessman as his father had been, the Journal did not do well, and young Clemens became restless. In 1853 he set out as an itinerant printer and worked his way eastward on newspapers in St. Louis, New York City, and Philadelphia. Except for a brief period as a printer in St. Louis, he worked at his trade for Orion in Keokuk, Iowa, until the fall of 1856. When in 1856 he began another period of wandering, he had a commission to write some comic travel letters for the Keokuk Daily Post. For almost four years Clemens plowed the Missouri; he later remembered these years as the most carefree of his life (Gwinn 76).
