The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [antikvár]

MARK TWAIN Samuel Langhornb Clemens was bom in Florida, Missouri, on 30 November 1835; his father, John Marshall Clemens, a lawyer, originating from Virginia; his mother, Jane Lampton, from Kentucky. When he was four, his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a small township on the Mississippi, where he continued to live until the age of eighteen. His formal education ended soon after his father's death in 1847, when he became a printer's apprentice, working for a time on the Missouri Courier, under the editorship of his elder brother, Orion. From 1853, he travelled widely, as a journeyman printer, in the Eastern States and in the West. As a result of a steamboat journey down the Mississippi, he met Horace Bixby, the captain of the boat, and turned to a career on the river. After an apprenticeship of one and a half years, he became a licensed pilot in 1859. He left the Mississippi at the outbreak of the Civil War, and became, in swift succession, an army volunteer, a gold prospector in Nevada, a timber speculator and a journalist. He met Artemus Ward and Bret Harte during this time and turned increasingly towards a professional literary career. While working for the Virginia City Enterprise, he adopted the pseudonym 'Mark Twain', the cry of a boatman taking soundings, and meaning two fathoms, i.e. twelve feet. The choice of name may have been characteristically ironic, since two fathoms was presumably an uncomfortable depth for a large steamboat. His first hook. Jumping Frog, appeared in 1865. Assignments as a travelling reporter to the Sandwich Islands and then to the Mediterranean and Middle East brought him success as a public lecturer and also material for his first major literary success. Innocents Abroad (1869). He married Ohvia Langdon the following year, and in 1871 established himself, as a