Advice to Youth ...Build your character thoughtfully and
painstakingly upon these precepts, and by and by, when you have
got it built, you will be surprised and gratified to see how
nicely and sharply it resembles everybody else's.... Pen name of
Samuel Clemens, American journalist, novelist, and humorist.
Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, beside the river that he
would later immortalize in the memoir Life on the Mississippi
(1883) and in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), one of
the greatest American novels. First apprenticed as a printer, he
was by turns a riverboat pilot, a Confederate soldier (for two
weeks), a gold prospector, and a journalist. His short story
"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1867) made
him famous; during his lifetime he was enormously popular,
lecturing widely to great acclaim and publishing a flood of
articles, essays, stories, and novels. Many of his books,
including the memoir Roughing It (1872) and the novel The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), are class