Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 in Florida, Missouri. He spent much of his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri, a town located on the Mississippi River. He never finished school and instead became an apprentice to a printer at the age of 12. In the 1850s, he worked as a boat pilot and later briefly served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. During this time he submitted his first journalism pieces, using the pseudonym Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass. He then traveled west and found work as a miner and a reporter. It was at this time that he first began to publish work under the name Mark Twain and establish himself as a sketchwriter and humorist. "Mark Twain" was a reference to his riverboat days; it was a term that the men who worked on the boats used to indicate the depth of the water...