Mark Twain's Real Name: Samuel Langhorne Clemens

Quick answer: Mark Twain's documented full name is Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Encyclopaedia Britannica records that form, along with Samuel L. Clemens, and gives his birth date as November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. The Mark Twain House & Museum also records November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, and identifies him as the sixth of seven children (Encyclopaedia Britannica; Mark Twain House & Museum).

Real name and early life

Britannica names his parents as John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton Clemens and says the family moved in 1839 to Hannibal, Missouri, a Mississippi River port town. The Mark Twain House likewise places the move at age four and notes that his father died in 1847, after which the boy left school to work as a printer's apprentice. He later worked as a newspaper printer in the East, then became a Mississippi River steamboat pilot, a career the House says ended when Civil War traffic closed the river. After a brief stint with a volunteer Confederate unit that he left after two weeks, he went west to the Nevada Territory with his brother Orion and, after failing as a silver prospector, began writing for Virginia City's Territorial Enterprise, where he first used the pen name Mark Twain.

Career highlights

His national break, the House says, came in 1865 with the short story "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog." Travel letters and lectures followed, then The Innocents Abroad (1869), which Britannica lists among the travel books that made him internationally famous, along with Roughing It (1872) and Life on the Mississippi (1883). He married Olivia Langdon in 1870 and moved the family to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1871. Britannica highlights his boyhood adventure novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Later years were marked by financial failure and family loss: the House records bankruptcy, a worldwide lecture tour after his publishing company failed in 1894, and the deaths of his daughter Susy in 1896 and of Jean in 1909.

Death

He died on April 21, 1910, at Stormfield, his home in Redding, Connecticut, at age 74, the Mark Twain House records. Britannica likewise gives April 21, 1910, in Redding.

Name notes for searchers

Samuel Langhorne Clemens is the documented full name; he was known professionally as Mark Twain, a pen name he first used in Nevada. Searchers looking for the author of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, or The Innocents Abroad are usually aiming at the same person.