Mark Twain author photo

Mark Twain

Nascido: November 30, 1835 – Florida, Missouri, United States

Mark Twain was an American author and humorist whose work explored childhood, race, class, and life along the Mississippi River. He is best known for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, novels that became enduring classics and helped shape American literature and satire.

Biografia e Jornada do Autor

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, grew up in nearby Hannibal, a Mississippi River town that would furnish the landscape, voices, and social tensions of much of his fiction. His father died when he was young, and Twain entered work early as a printer’s apprentice and typesetter, gaining practical experience with language through newspapers and job printing. A decisive turning point came when he trained as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, absorbing the river culture that later shaped both his pen name and his imagination. The Civil War disrupted that life, and after a brief, abortive stint with a Confederate militia, he moved west, working as a miner, journalist, and travel correspondent in Nevada and California.

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Citações

quote
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts
-The Innocents Abroad
quote
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't
-Following the Equator
quote
Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do
-The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
quote
When angry, count four; when very angry, swear
-The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson
quote
Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs a step at a time
-The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson
quote
Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits
-The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson
quote
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot
-Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
quote
When in doubt, tell the truth
-When in Doubt, Tell the Truth

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Vozes da Comunidade

"Mark Twain was an American humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who acquired international fame"

Britannica

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn"

Ernest Hemingway

"Mark Twain put his voice on paper with a fidelity and vitality that makes electronic recordings seem crude and quaint"

Ursula K. Le Guin

"A distinguished novelist, fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and literary critic, Mark Twain ranks among the great figures of American literature"

Poetry Foundation

"Mark Twain was, by long odds, the largest figure that ever reared itself out of the flat, damp prairie of American literature"

H. L. Mencken

"The world knows him as Mark Twain, the perpetually quotable writer of such classic American novels as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer"

PBS American Experience

"Mark Twain was the first truly American writer, and all of us are his heirs"

William Faulkner

"Mark Twain is the Lincoln of our literature"

William Dean Howells

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