Biographie de Mark Twain
Mark TWAIN was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, about forty miles southwest of Hannibal, the Mississippi River town he was to celebrate in his writing. In 1853 he left home, earning a living as an itinerant typesetter, and four years later became an apprentice pilot on the Mississippi, a career cut short by the outbreak of the Civil War. For five years, as a prospector and a journalist, Clemens lived in Nevada and California.
In February 1863 he first signed the pseudonym "Mark Twain" to a newspaper article, and a trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 became the basis of his first major book, The Innocents Abroad (1869). Roughing It (1872), his account of experiences in the West, was followed by a coauthored satirical novel, The Gilded Age (1873) ; Sketches, New and Old (1875) ; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) ; A Tramp Abroad (1880) ; The Prince and the Pauper (1881) ; Life on the Mississippi (1883) ; his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) ; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) ; and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894).
Compelled by debts, Clemens moved his family abroad during the 1890s and went on a round-the-world lecture tour in 1895-1896. His fortunes mended, he returned to America in 1900. He was as celebrated for his white suit and his mane of white hair as for his uncompromising stands against injustice and imperialism, as well as his invariably quoted comments on any subject under the sun. Samuel Clemens died on April 21, 1910.
Azar NAFISI is the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, a number one New York Times bestseller that chronicled her experiences teaching English and American classics to her students in Tehran ; Things I've Been Silent About ; and The Republic of Imagination, in which she considers her evolving relationship with and understanding of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A passionate advocate of books and reading, she speaks to audiences around the world about the essential role of fiction in both totalitarian and democratic societies.
She is a visiting professor and the executive director of Cultural Conversations at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and lives in Washington, D.C.
