Were you ever lost in a cave?
Did you ever camp for days on a wooded island in the Mississippi, feasting on fish and turtle eggs, and playing pirate?
Did you ever dig for treasure? Visit an old grave yard at midnight? Or plan to become a steamboat pilot?
Possibly not. But Samuel L. Clemens (known to the world as "Mark Twain") survived many such pleasures and lived to write about them in such memorable books as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Life on the Mississippi.
Tom and Huck are undoubtedly the best-known, best-loved characters in American fiction. This is principally due to Mark Twain's genius as a story teller. But it is also partly due to the fact that this great humorist drew richly upon his own boyhood experiences for his characters and episodes.
This non-fictionized biography of Mark Twain retains the mood the Twain's own books, but deals exclusively with real characters, real events and historically verifiable facts. It covers the life of Samuel Clemens from November 1835 when his birth was heralded by Hailey's comet flaming through the sky to April 1910 when that comet returned from outer space to herald his death.
Between those dates we see him as a happy river boy, a wandering typesetter, a proud steamboat pilot, a luckless silver miner and the ace reporter or the Territorial Enterprise during the wildest days of Virginia City, Nevada. We follow him to San Francisco and New York to watch his meteoric rise to fame as one of America's most popular lecturers and writers.
Later we see him as a devoted husband and father, a world traveler and finally as a distinguished, beloved, and rather sad old man, famous throughout the world, but longing for the unobtainable—his boyhood on the Mississippi.
Out of his nostalgia for that boyhood he created books which will be in print as long as there are young readers eager to share the wooded hills, the island, the river and the cave.
—from the dust jacket
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