Автор: Файт Лариса Викторовна, учитель английского языка ГБОУ СОШ №477 г. Пушкин, СПб

 Mark Twain (1835 – 1910) is a nickname of Samual Langhorn Clemens. He was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, He was the sixth of seven children. Twain was born two weeks after the closest approach to Earth of Halley’s Comet.

 Sam was born in a very small town. A hundred people lived there and Sam “increased the population by 1 per cent”. There, on the bank of the Missouri, Samual Clemens spent his childhood.

He was a bright, lively boy. He went fishing and swimming to the river and he was the leader in all the boy’s games. When he was four, Twain’s family moved to Hannibal, a port town.

Missouri was a slave state. He saw negroes chained like animals. His father owned slaves. For a girl of fifteen he paid twelve dollars, for a woman of twenty-five, he paid twenty-five dollars… All the negroes of his own age were friends of Sam. The young boy never forgot these sad things.

 When Sam was 11, his father died (1849). He left his wife and four children with nothing. The boy had to leave the school and look for a work. He delivered newspapers, he was a blacksmith’s helper, a bookseller’s assistant. He learned the profession of a printer.

 For some years he worked as a printer for the town newspaper. Then he went to work as “a skilled printer of 15” for his brother Orion who managed a small newspaper in Hannibal. The two young men published it themselves. Samuel began to write humorous stories, published them in their newspaper.

 When Samuel was a boy, he dreamt of becoming a sailor. At the age of twenty he found a job on a ship travelling up and down the Mississippi. Here on a ship he ‘found’ his pen-name “Mark Twain”. It was taken from the call of the Mississippi pilots when they measured the depth of the river.

 Many steamboats moved up and down the river carrying all kinds of people – rich and poor, farmers and businessmen, slave owners and slaves. Samuel Clemens saw America passing before his eyes. This work gave him opportunity to get knowledge about life. He worked as a pilot for more than four years.

 Later he used to speak about this time as the happiest period of his life and described it in his book “Life on the Mississippi”. Then the young man worked with the goldminers in California for a year. Here he began to write stories about camp life and sent them to newspapers under the name of Mark Twain.

 Soon he went to work as a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.  Mark Twain became one of the best known storytellers in the West. He got a big break in 1865 when one of his tales about life in a mining camp was printed in newspapers and magazines around the country — Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.

 In 1867 he took a five- month sea cruise in the Mediterranean and wrote humorously about the sights for American newspapers. In 1869 The Innocents Abroad was published, and became a bestseller.  At 34, this Westerner — handsome, red-haired, egocentric, and ambitious — had become one of the most popular and famous writers in America.

 In February 1870, Samuel Clemens married to the twenty-four year old Olivia (Livy) Langdon, daughter of a rich New York coal merchant. Writing to a friend shortly after his wedding, Twain could not believe his good luck: "I have... the only sweetheart I have ever loved... she is the best girl, and the sweetest, and gentlest...“ They settled first in Buffalo and had four children.

 For the next 17 years ( )‚ Sam‚ Livy and their three daughters (Clara, Jean and Susy) lived in the Hartford home. Those were happy years.

 One of Mark Twain’s daughters began the biography of her father in this way: “We are a very happy family. Our family consists of dad, mum, Jean, Clara and me. Dad has beautiful grey hair, kind blue eyes and a small moustache. In short, he is an extraordinary man. He is very funny. He tells perfectly delightful stories.”

 During those years Mark Twain wrote some of his most famous novels such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

 1.Трубникова Т. О., Шеварихина Ю. С. Сценарии тематических вечеров и предметной недели английского языка в 5,6,7 классах.- Ростов н/ Д: изд-во «Феникс»,  2. ru.wikipedia.org  3. online-literature.com  4.