Samuel Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835. His family soon moved to Hannibal, Missouri, where he spent his boyhood. In 1853 he left home to become an itinerant printer. By 1857 he had become an apprentice pilot on the Mississippi River. That experience was to define much of his most popular literary work and help create his nom de plume, "Mark Twain."
During the Civil War, Clemens spent two weeks in the Confederate Army, resigned his commission, and went to the Nevada Territory with his brother Orion. He prospected unsuccessfully in the mining camps of Nevada and then joined the Virginia City Enterprise newspaper as a reporter, where he first used the name Mark Twain. In 1866 he visited the Sandwich Islands, gave his first lectures, and began to write his travel letters to the San Francisco Alta California newspaper. He wrote the "Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" in 1867 and then left on an excursion to the Mediterranean.
Clemens wrote an article about his first visit to Hartford in 1868. The following year his first subscription book, Innocents Abroad, was published by Elisha Bliss of the American Publishing Company in Hartford, Connecticut. He fell in love and married Olivia Langdon of Elmira, New York, in February 1870, and they settled in Buffalo, New York. Their first son, Langdon, was born later that year. In 1871 they moved to the Nook Farm community in Hartford, renting the Hooker House on Forest Street. Langdon died in the house in 1872, the same year Olivia Susan Clemens was born. Roughing It, Mark Twain's second book, was also published that year.
