Mark Twain  (1835-1910) LINKS Mark Twain E-Texts http://www.literature.org/Works/Mark-Twain The e-text of Huckleberry Finn (accessible by chapter) and other works, some of which are still under construction. Mark Twain Resources on the Web http://web.syr.edu/~fjzwick/twainwww.html The best collection of information on Mark Twain's life and work available online, this site contains a wealth of links on e-texts as well as on archival, biographical, and critical material available on the web. Be sure to take the time to explore all these rich resources to find information useful in your research on Twain. Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections, and Related Resources http://www.tarleton.edu/~schmidts/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. Mark Twain Forum Home Page http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/www/forum/twainweb.html An excellent, quirky site that gives you information on how to join a discussion list on Twain's life and work — a great way to ask questions and to brainstorm potential essay topics. The most useful part of this site for your essays on Twain are the extensive lists of literary criticism, biographies, editions of Twain's writings, and related publications on Twain and popular culture: each entry is complete with a full review for you to peruse. Be sure to check out the links to writings inspired by Twain's work and other essays on his life and (often controversial) opinions. Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/twain/huckfinn.html A useful archive for your essays on Twain, this online version of the first edition of Twain's novel comes complete with its original 174 illustrations for you to view. Also at this site are early reviews of the novel — dozens of excerpts from newspapers and magazines that will add to your interpretations of Huckleberry Finn and its contemporary significance. 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 Midwest, 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 a 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 earlier 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).

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