Mark Twain | Teen Ink

Mark Twain

June 13, 2014
By Katherine Gonzalez BRONZE, Lemon Grove, California
Katherine Gonzalez BRONZE, Lemon Grove, California
4 articles 0 photos 0 comments

Not only was Mark Twain a good role model,yet he was a good writer that influenced people.Mark Twain’s original birth name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens,he was born on the 30th of November,1835,in Florida,Missouri.Mark’s parents,John and Jane Clemens were mixed of English and Irish stock,and came from slave-holding families.John Clemens was a Lawyer who began working independently at age fourteen.John Clemens was known as a hot tempered and a person who never laughed.Mark’s mother Jane Lampton was a kind woman who loved to dance.Law practice couldnt support the family in the tiny Hamlet of Florida therefore Mark and his family moved to Hannibal,thirty miles away,where John Clemens opened a general store on main street.Mark attended private schools while living there,where he realized his ambition to become a Pilot.Mark also began to read interesting novels and poems about mysterious slave stories,which Mark was accustomed to because he lived in an area of slave owning.When Mark was eleven his father died from Pneumonia caused by a sleet storm.This caused many problems emotionally and economically,Mark no longer could go to school,and had to get a job therefore he became a delivery boy for the local paper.Later he developed skills in to becoming a Journeyman printer,which after made him receive a job with his brother Henry as a printer and and editorial assistant where he was promised $3.50 a week.While he he worked there,he took advantage and began to write beyond the borders of Hannibal in the spring of 1852.Mark first sent a comic to a weekly in Boston that he called the “Carpet-Bag” which showed ladies impressing on a steamboat.Many fell in love with his style of mocking writing and funny poems,he was later known as a comedy writer. Later in June,Mark visted his sister and found a job in the composing room of newspaper.Where he earned enough money to go to a trip to New York.Mark wrote about his trip and Orion published his letter on September 8,1853 and people were impressed.Later on, Mark moved to many places and read many novels throughout his traveling time.In the summer of 1855,Mark joined Orion again.At an event in Keokuk,Mark made an after dinner speech that made the audience roar of laughter and left them astonished,Mark was later recrutied into a debating society.Mark was seized with Amazon fever ,which most American population had,and he decided to head to South American and harvest coca plant and make a fortune.As he lived by the river,Mark educated himself more about American society and how it worked.While working on the steamboats at New Orelans,Mark fell in love with a fifteen year old girl named Laura,and wrote to her after leaving and she never replied.Fourty years later they saw each other again and married each other and realized that she never recieved his letter. Mark worked as a pilot on the packet Pennsylvania where he got his brother Henry to become a clerk at the same place.One time Henry got into a dispute with an arrogant man and Mark fought him and was offered a job and did not want to have it and left only Henry working at New Orleans, four days later the boilers on the Pennsylvania blew up and killed approximately 150 people,including Henry.Mark ever since, felt guilty of his brother’s death and was ashamed for the rest of his life .



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