THE WORLD OF MARK TWAIN AND
ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN
| 1835 | Samuel Langhorne Clemens is born prematurely in Florida, Mis souri, the fourth child of John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lamp ton Clemens. |
| 1839 | The family moves to Hannibal, the small Missouri town on the west bank of the Mississippi River that will become the model for the setting of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. |
| 1840 | American newspapers gain increased readership as urban popu lations swell and printing technology improves. |
| 1847 | John Clemens dies, leaving the family in financial difficulty. Sam quits school at the age of twelve. |
| 1848 | Sam becomes a full-time apprentice to Joseph Ament of the Mis souri Courier. |
| 1850 | Sam’s brother Orion, ten years his senior, returns to Hannibal and establishes the Journal; he hires Sam as a compositor. Steam boats become the primary means of transport on the Mississippi River. |
| 1852 | Sam edits the failing Journal while Orion is away. After he reads local humor published in newspapers in New England and the Southwest, Sam begins printing his own humorous sketches in the Journal. He submits “The Dandy Frightening the Squatter” to the Carpet-Bag of Boston, which publishes the sketch in the May issue. |
| 1853 | Sam leaves Hannibal and begins working as an itinerant printer; he visits St. Louis, New York, and Philadelphia. His brothers Orion and Henry move to Iowa with their mother. |
| 1854 | Transcendentalism flourishes in American literary culture; Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden. |
| 1855 | Sam works again as a printer with Orion in Keokuk, Iowa. |
| 1856 | Sam acquires a commission from Keokuk’s Daily Post to write humorous letters; he decides to travel to South America. |
| 1857 | Sam takes a steamer to New Orleans, where he hopes to find a ship bound for South America. Instead, he signs on as an ap prentice to river pilot Horace Bixby and spends the next two years learning how to navigate a steamship up and down the Missis sippi. His experiences become material for Life on the Mississippi and his tales of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. |
| 1858 | Sam’s brother Henry dies in a steamboat accident. |
| 1859 | Samuel Clemens becomes a fully licensed river pilot. |
| 1861 | The American Civil War erupts, putting an abrupt stop to river trade between North and South. Sam serves with a Confederate militia for two weeks before venturing to the Nevada Territory with Orion, who had been appointed by President Abraham Lin coln as secretary of the new Territory. |
| 1862 | After an unsuccessful stint as a miner and prospector for gold and silver, Clemens begins reporting for the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada. |
| 1863 | Clemens signs his name as “Mark Twain” on a humorous travel sketch printed in the Territorial Enterprise. The pseudonym, a riverboat term meaning “two fathoms deep,” connotes barely nav igable water. |
| 1864 | After challenging his editor to a duel, Twain is forced to leave Nevada and lands a job with a San Francisco newspaper. He meets Artemus Ward, a popular humorist, whose techniques greatly influence Twain’s writing. |
| 1865 | Robert E. Lee’s army surrenders, ending the Civil War. While prospecting for gold in Calaveras County, California, Twain hears a tale he uses for a story that makes him famous; originally titled “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” it is published in New York’s Saturday Press. |
| 1866 | Twain travels to Hawaii as a correspondent for the Sacramento Union; upon his return to California, he delivers his first public lecture, beginning a successful career as a humorous speaker. |
| 1867 | Twain travels to New York, and then to Europe and the Holy Land aboard the steamer Quaker City; during five months abroad, he contributes to California’s largest paper, Sacramento’s Alta California, and writes several letters for the New York Tribune. |
| He publishes a volume of stories and sketches, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches. | |
| 1868 | Twain meets and falls in love with Olivia (Livy) Langdon. His overseas writings have increased his popularity; he signs his first book contract and begins The Innocents Abroad, sketches based on his trip to the Holy Land. He embarks on a lecture tour of the American Midwest. |
| 1869 | Twain becomes engaged to Livy, who acts as his editor from that time on. The Innocents Abroad, published as a subscription book, is an instant success, selling nearly 100,000 copies in the first three years. |
| 1870 | Twain and Livy marry. Their son, Langdon, is born; he lives only two years. |
| 1871 | The Clemens move to Hartford, Connecticut. |
| 1872 | Roughing It, an account of Twain’s adventures out West, is pub lished to enormous success. The first of Twain’s three daughters, Susy, is born. Twain strikes up a lifelong friendship with the writer William Dean Howells. |
| 1873 | Ever the entrepreneur, Twain receives the patent for Mark Twain’s Self-Pasting Scrapbook, an invention that is a commercial success. He publishes The Gilded Age, a collaboration with his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner that satirizes the post-Civil War era. |
| 1874 | His daughter Clara is born. The family moves into a mansion in Hartford in which they will live for the next seventeen years. |
| 1876 | The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is published. |
| 1877 | Twain collaborates with Bret Harte—an author known for his use of local color and humor and for his parodies of Cooper, Dickens, and Hugo—to produce the play Ah Sin. |
| 1880 | Twain invests in the Paige typesetter and loses thousands of dol lars. He publishes A Tramp Abroad, an account of his travels in Europe the two previous years. His daughter Jean is born. |
| 1881 | The Prince and the Pauper, Twain’s first historical romance, is published. |
| 1882 | Twain plans to write about the Mississippi River and makes the trip from New Orleans to Minnesota to refresh his memory. |
| 1883 | The nonfiction work Life on the Mississippi is published. |
| 1884 | Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a book Twain worked on for |
| nearly ten years, is published in England; publication in the United States is delayed until the following year because an il lustration plate is judged to be obscene. | |
| 1885 | When Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is published in America—by Twain’s ill-fated publishing house, run by his nephew Charles Webster—controversy immediately surrounds the book. Twain also publishes the memoirs of his friend former President Ulysses S. Grant. |
| 1888 | Twain earns his Master of Arts degree from Yale University. |
| 1889 | He publishes A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the first of his major works to be informed by a deep pessimism. He meets Rudyard Kipling, who had come to America to meet Twain, in Livy’s hometown of Elmira, New York. |
| 1890 | Twain’s mother dies. |
| 1891 | Financial difficulties force the Clemens family to close their Hart ford mansion; they move to Berlin, Germany. |
| 1894 | The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, a dark novel about the after math of slavery, is published and sells well; nonetheless, Twain’s publishing company fails and leaves him bankrupt. |
| 1895 | Twain embarks on an ambitious worldwide lecture tour to restore his financial position. |
| 1896 | His daughter Susy dies of spinal meningitis. |
| 1901 | Twain is awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Yale. |
| 1902 | Livy falls gravely ill. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, a stage ad aptation of the novel, opens to favorable reviews. Though he is credited with coauthorship, Twain has little to do with the play and never sees it performed. He receives an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Missouri. |
| 1903 | Hoping to restore Livy’s health, Twain takes her to Florence, Italy. |
| 1904 | Livy dies, leaving Twain devastated. He begins dictating an un even autobiography that he never finishes. |
| 1905 | Theodore Roosevelt invites Twain to the White House. Twain enjoys a gala celebrating his seventieth birthday in New York. He continues to lecture, and he addresses Congress on copyright is sues. |
| 1906 | Twain’s biographer Albert Bigelow Paine moves in with the fam ily. |
| 1907 | Twain travels to Oxford University to receive an honorary Doctor of Letters degree. |
| 1908 | Twain settles in Redding, Connecticut, at Stormfield, the man sion that is his final home. |
| 1909 | His daughter Clara marries; Twain dons his Oxford robe for the ceremony. His daughter Jean dies. |
| 1910 | Twain travels to Bermuda for his health. He develops heart prob lems and, upon his return to Stormfield, dies, leaving behind a cache of unpublished work. |