Samuel Clemens

Samuel Clemens. . , Samuel Clemens was born November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri. When he was four, his family moved to Hannibal where he spent his childhood. , Clemens moved to Keokuk in the mid1850s to work in his brother Orion’s print shop at 2nd and Main Streets. Orion hadn’t much of a head for business so he was rarely able to pay Clemens. Sam was willing to bide his time but he was ambitious and throughout the summer and fall of 1856 that ambition grew. , He had been reading the exploits of American naval lieutenant, William Herndon who, several years earlier, had explored the main branch of the Amazon River, traveling 4000 miles by canoe. Clemens read all he could about the Herndon expedition and came to see the Amazon as just the sort of place where a young man might make his fortune. , He would have left for the Amazon right away, except he was flat broke. Then, one windy November day in Keokuk, shortly before his twenty-first birthday, from the corner of his eye he saw a scrap of paper float by. It was a fifty dollar bill! Clemens advertised his find but when, after 4 days, no one claimed the money, he used it to pay for passage on a steamboat bound for Cincinnati where after several months he’d saved enough to begin his great adventure. He booked passage for New Orleans where he planned to get on the next ship going to Para, a city at the mouth of the Amazon. Upon arrival in New Orleans, Clemens discovered that it might be as much as ten or twelve years before a ship would leave for Para. , Looking up the pilot of the boat that had brought him down river, Clemens begged to be taken on as a cub and soon became a riverboat pilot himself. When the Civil War brought this career to an end, Sam traveled west where he began to write under the pen name Mark Twain. , In his career, Clemens wrote 28 books and many short stories, most notably, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. , Clemens died April 21, 1910, the years of his birth and his death marked by the appearance of Halley’s Comet.