Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He was born in 1835 in the United States and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, a small town on the Mississippi River. He worked as a printer, steamboat pilot, gold prospector, newspaper reporter, humorist, publisher and world-wide lecturer.

Samuel Clemens wrote mostly about the times he lived and the travels he took. As a humorist, he used the wildly comic exaggeration common in American tall tales or folk yarns - frequently to attack false pride and self-satisfaction. He used various American dialects and mimicked the rhythms of real speech. People say he was one of the first to develop a distinctly American writing style.

The name, "Mark Twain", comes from a Mississippi riverboat term meaning that the water was two fathoms deep.