Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1935 in Missouri, USA. He trained and worked as a printer until 1857 when he became an apprentice pilot on the steamboats of the Mississippi River. After a brief spell as a miner in Nevada he took up journalism and began using the pen name Mark Twain. Some years of travelling and lecturing followed and in 1870 he married and settled in Connecticut where, in 1876, he wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was published eight years later. Clemens suffered great tragedy in later life with the death of his wife and two daughters. He died in 1910.