DID YOU KNOW?
All the books Mark Twain wrote
Anyway, Twain knew his way around a newspaper office, so that September, he went to work as a reporter for the “Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.” He churned out news stories, editorials, and sketches, and along the way adopted the pen name “Mark Twain.” Twain became one of the best-known storytellers in the West. He honed a distinctive narrative style, friendly, funny, irreverent, often satirical, and always eager to deflate the pretentious.
camp, "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," was printed in newspapers and magazines around the country. Then in 1867, when he took a five-month sea cruise in the Mediterranean, writing humorously about the sights for American newspapers to get a book out of the trip. In 1869, “The Innocents Abroad” was published, and it became a nationwide bestseller. At 34, this handsome, red-haired, affable, canny, egocentric, and ambitious journalist and traveler had become one of the most popular and famous writers in America.
In February 1870, he married 24-year-old Olivia (Livy) Langdon, the daughter of a rich New York coal merchant. Twain hoped that she would "reform" him, a mere humorist, from his rustic ways. The couple settled in Buffalo and later had four children.
Now, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” was published in 1876, and soon thereafter he began writing a sequel, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Huck Finn required years to conceptualize and write, and Twain often put it aside. In the meantime, he pursued respectability with the 1881 publication of “The Prince and the Pauper,” a charming novel endorsed with enthusiasm by his genteel family and friends. Then in 1883, he put out “Life on the Mississippi,” an interesting but safe travel book. When “Huck Finn” finally was published in 1884, Livy gave it a chilly reception.
In 1885, he triumphed as a book publisher by issuing the bestselling memoirs of former President Ulysses S. Grant, who had just died. He lavished many hours on this and other business ventures, and was certain that his efforts would be rewarded with enormous wealth, but he never achieved the success he expected. His publishing house eventually went bankrupt.
become the savior of his struggling family and the sharpest-dressed man in Virginia City and San Francisco. But nothing panned out, and by the middle of 1862, he was flat broke and in need of a regular job.
Now, he got a big break in 1865, when one of his tales about life in a mining