Mark Twain is the penname for Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a man born in Missouri in 1835.  Growing up with books, Clemens loved to read, soon entering the publishing business himself.  He began by writing for a small-town paper he and his older brother ran. Later, he traveled to New York, lived there for awhile, but then moved west again, taking up steamboat navigating and learning the quintessential American traditions of frontier individualism.