Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 in Missouri, was an American writer best known for his novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was one of the most influential American writers of the nineteenth century and a sharp critic of his nation’s social and moral contradictions. Twain used humor, satire, and realism in his writing to expose the hypocrisy, greed, and inequality that lay beneath America’s outward prosperity.

Twain got his first taste of writing in the newspaper trade. At the age of 12, he became an apprentice printer and later as a typesetter for his older brother’s newspaper. It was there that he occasionally contributed sketches and articles under various pseudonyms. At the age of 18, he traveled east to New York and Philadelphia to work for different newspapers and continued to publish articles. 

But young Samuel Clemens had a dream he wanted to fulfill as a steamboat pilot. He grew up in Hannibal, MO, on the banks of the Mississippi River, watching the steamboats sail by. On a steamboat trip in 1857 heading for New Orleans, Clemens convinced the riverboat captain, Horace Bixby, to take him on as his apprentice. For the next two years, he learned the art of piloting and obtained his license in 1859. He continued in this profession until the start of the Civil War in 1861, when riverboat traffic took a decline. All through these years on the river, Clemens continued to write, even getting sketches and articles published in various newspapers. And it was here on the river that his pen name was born, Mark Twain – a riverboat term for 12ft of water, signifying safe traveling depth for boats. 

Twain’s first claim to wide notoriety came in 1865 when he published a story titled Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog in newspapers around the country, which later became a short story in his first book titled The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches. This started Twain’s literary career in earnest. Twain’s writing style was innovative for its time. He rejected formal, genteel literary traditions and instead embraced informal language, regional dialects, and everyday speech. This approach gave his work authenticity and made it accessible to ordinary readers. His novels and writings depict American life while addressing serious issues such as racism, moral development, and social conformity. 

Twain’s views on the Gilded Age were deeply critical. In fact, the term “Gilded Age” used today to describe the years of 1870 to about 1900 is attributed to the novel titled The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, co-authored by Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. In their work, Twain and Warner portrayed a society obsessed with wealth, political corruption, and speculation, where appearances masked moral decline. They argued that rapid industrialization and unchecked capitalism encouraged dishonesty and widened the gap between rich and poor.