(Samuel Langhorne Clemens; Florida, USA, 1835 - Redding, id., 1910) American writer. Tireless adventurer, he found in his own life the inspiration for his literary works. He grew up in Hannibal, a small town on the Mississippi. At the age of twelve he was left fatherless, abandoned his studies and entered as a typographer's apprentice in a publishing house, at the same time that he began to write his first newspaper articles in Philadelphia and Saint Louis.

At the age of eighteen he decided to leave home and begin his travels in search of adventure and, above all, fortune. He worked as a typographer for a time in his region, and then headed for New Orleans; on the way he signed up as an apprentice pilot on a river steamer, a profession he was enthusiastic about and which he carried out for a time, until the Civil War of 1861 interrupted river traffic, putting an end to his career as a pilot.

He then headed west to the mountains of Nevada, where he worked in the primitive mining camps. His desire to make a fortune led him to search for gold, without much success, so he was forced to work as a journalist, writing articles that soon took on a personal style. His first literary success came in 1865, with the short story The Famous Jumping Frog of Calaveras, which appeared in a newspaper already signed with the pseudonym of Mark Twain, a technical name for pilots that means "mark two probes".

As a journalist, he traveled to San Francisco, where he met the writer Bret Harte, who encouraged him to pursue his literary career. He then began a period of continuous travels, as a journalist and lecturer, which took him to Polynesia and Europe, and whose experiences he recounted in the travel book Los inocentes en el extranjero (1869), followed by A la brega (1872), in which he recreated his adventures in the West.

After marrying Olivia Langdon in 1870, he settled in Connecticut. Six years later he published the first novel that would make him famous, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, based on his childhood on the banks of the Mississippi. He had previously written a novel in collaboration with C. D. Warner, The Gilded Age (1873), which was considered rather mediocre.

However, his literary talent was fully displayed with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1882), a work also set on the banks of the Mississippi, although not as autobiographical as Tom Sawyer, and which is undoubtedly his masterpiece, and even one of the most outstanding in American literature, for which he has been considered the American Dickens. It is also worth mentioning Life on the Mississippi (1883), a work that, more than a novel, is a splendid evocation of the South, not without criticism, as a result of his work as a pilot.

With a popular style, full of humor, Mark Twain contrasts in these works the idealized world of childhood, innocent and at the same time mischievous, with a disenchanted conception of the adult man, the man of the industrial era, of the "golden age" that followed the Civil War, deceived by morality and civilization. In his later works, however, the sense of humor and the freshness of the childish world evoked give way to an increasingly evident pessimism and bitterness, albeit expressed with irony and sarcasm.

A series of personal misfortunes, among them the death of one of his daughters and his wife, as well as a serious economic breakdown, cast a shadow over the last years of his life. In one of his last works, The Mysterious Stranger, he stated that he felt like a supernatural visitor, who arrived with Halley's comet, and that he was to leave the Earth with the next reappearance of the comet, as indeed happened.

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