Sam Clemens
Samuel Clemens
Samuel Clemens was born and grew up in Hannibal, Missouri. This was the home of his later characters Tom Sawer and Huck Finn. In his books he incorporated features that really existed in Hannibal. Features like Holidays Hill, Bear Creek and Lover?s Leap were incorporated into his storys. Clemens described the residents of Hannibal as content with the lives they led in their small town.
In his late teens, Clemens left Hannibal on a riverboat to become a printer in St. Louis. He moved up in the ranks of printing and moved to New York and eventually to Washington D.C. Clemens remembered how much fun he had had on the riverboat and how glorious it must have been to be a pilot. He soon decided to move to New Orleans to become a pilot. On the boat, he often heard things like ?Mark the twain, two fathoms deep?. He liked how the words ?Mark Twain? sounded and in one of his first books, ?Life on the Mississippi? about his four years piloting the Spread Eagle along the twisting river, he decided to use the name Mark Twain.
Mark Twain stopped piloting the
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