What you possess in the world will be found at the day of your death to belong to someone else. But what you are will be yours forever.

Writer and humorist                          

Selected Works:

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County - fiction - 1867
General Washington's Negro Body-Servant - fiction - 1868
My Late Senatorial Secretaryship - fiction - 1868
The Innocents Abroad - non-fiction travel - 1869
Memoranda - monthly column for The Galaxy magazine - 1870-71
Mark Twain's - Burlesque -  Autobiography and First Romance - fiction - 1871
Roughing It - non-fiction - 1872
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today - fiction, made into a play - 1873
Sketches New and Old - fictional stories - 1875 
Old Times on the Mississippi - non-fiction - 1876
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - fiction - 1876
A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage - fiction - 1876 - 1945, private edition - 2001, Atlantic Monthly
A True Story and the Recent Carnival of Crime - stories - 1877
The Invalid's Story - Fiction - 1877
Punch, Brothers, Punch! and other Sketches fictional stories - 1878
A Tramp Abroad - travel - 1880
1601: Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors - fiction - 1880
The Prince and the Pauper - fiction - 1882
Life on the Mississippi - non-fiction - 1883
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - fiction - 1884
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - fiction - 1889
The American Claimant - fiction - 1892
Merry Tales - fictional stories - 1892
Those Extraordinary Twins - fiction - 1892
The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories - fictional stories - 1893
Tom Sawyer Abroad - fiction - 1894
The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson - fiction - 1894
Tom Sawyer, Detective - fiction - 1896
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - fiction - 1896
How to Tell a Story and other Essays - non-fictional essays - 1897
Following the Equator - non-fiction travel - 1897
Is He Dead? - play - 1898
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg - fiction - 1900
A Salutation Speech From the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth - essay - 1900
The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Updated - satire - 1901
Edmund Burke on Croker and Tammany - political satire - 1901
To the Person Sitting in Darkness - essay - 1901
A Double Barrelled Detective Story - fiction - 1902
A Dog's Tale - fiction - 1904
Extracts from Adam's Diary - fiction - 1904
King Leopold's Soliloquy - political satire - 1905
The War Prayer - fiction - 1905
The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories - fiction - 1906
What Is Man? - essay - 1906
Eve's Diary - fiction - 1906
Christian Science - non-fiction critique - 1907
A Horse's Tale - fiction - 1907
Is Shakespeare Dead? - non-fiction - 1907
Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven - fiction - 1909
Letters from the Earth - fiction, published posthumously - 1909 Queen Victoria's Jubilee - non-fiction - 1910
My Platonic Sweetheart - dream journal, possibly non-fiction - 1912
The Mysterious Stranger - fiction, possibly not by Twain, published posthumously - 1916
Mark Twain's Autobiography - non-fiction, published posthumously - 1924
Mark Twain's Notebook - published posthumously - 1935
Letters from the Earth - posthumous, edited by Bernard DeVoto -1962 
No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger - fiction, published posthumously - 1969
Concerning the Jews - published posthumously - 1985
Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War. Jim Zwick, ed. - Syracuse University Press - 1992 -  previously uncollected, published posthumously - 
The Bible According to Mark Twain: Writings on Heaven, Eden, and the Flood - published posthumously - 1995.                                              

Mother Jane Lampton Clemens
Father John Marshall Clemens, the sixth of seven children. Only three of his siblings survived childhood: his brothers Orion and Henry and his sister Pamela. His sister Margaret died when Samuel was four years old, and his brother Benjamin died three years later. Another brother, Pleasant, died at the age of six months.                                              

His primary pen name came from working on Mississippi riverboats, where two fathoms, a depth indicating "safe water" for the boat to float over, was measured on the sounding line.

 A fathom is a maritime unit of depth, equivalent to two yards - six feet, approximately 1.8 metres; "twain" is an archaic term for "two". 

The riverboatman's cry was "mark twain" or, more fully, "by the mark twain", meaning "according to the mark - on the line, tthe depth is - two  - fathoms", that is, "there are 12 feet of water under the boat and it is safe to pass".