Mark Twain (1835–1910) Lost in the Snow LINKS Mark Twain Resources on the Web http://web.syr.edu/~fjzwick/twainwww.html This comprehensive, annotated site for Twain resources is maintained at the Mining Company by Jim Zwick of Syracuse University. It features weekly articles, a biography, a lengthy list of links, including links to texts and related criticism, and much more information. Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections, and Related Resources http://www.tarleton.edu/activities/pages/facultypages/schmidt/Mark_Twain.html This site, maintained by Barbara Schmidt at Tarleton State University, provides a huge list of Twain's witty epigrams which are indexed alphabetically according to topic. There are also quite a few interesting links at this site. BIOGRAPHY Mark Twain (1835–1910)  Born Samuel L. Clemens in Florida, Missouri, Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River (mark twain, a phrase meaning "two fathoms deep," was used by Mississippi riverboat pilots in making soundings). Sometime after his father's death in 1847, Twain left school to become a printer's apprentice, worked as a journeyman printer and newspaper reporter in the East and Middle West, and became a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River until the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1861, he departed for Nevada with his brother, spent a year prospecting for silver, then returned to newspaper work as a reporter. In 1867, a San Francisco newspaper sent him as correspondent on a cruise ship to Europe and the Holy Land. He used the dispatches he wrote about this voyage as the basis for his first, highly successful book, The Innocents Abroad (1869). His second book, Roughing It (1872), described his western years and added to his already considerable reputation as an irreverent humorist. No longer explicitly autobiographical but still drawing on his own life, Twain published his masterpieces, the novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Twain remained a prolific and important writer and by the time of his death had become something of a national institution, although he never again quite matched the achievements of these early works. Financial problems and personal tragedies contributed to his increasingly bleak view of the human condition, expressed most powerfully in such works as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900), and the posthumously published The Mysterious Stranger (1916).