Mark Twain's real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens.He was born on 30 November 1835 in Florida,Missouri,USA.When he was four years old,he and his family went to live in Hannibal,Missouri,a town on the Mississippi River.He grew up on the river and a lot of the adventures in his books happened to him when he was a boy.When he was twenty-two years old,he started working as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River.He traveled up and clown the long river for four years.Then in 1861 he decided to go to Nevada and California：during the 1860s a lot of Americans went to the West to start a new life.He liked writing and he became a journalist i for the Morning Call in San Francisco,California.He started to use the name Mark Twain for his writing.In 1865 he wrote the short story \"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County\" and it was a great success.He became a famous writer and traveled to Hawaii and Europe.He met Olivia \"Livy\" Langdon in 1868 and married her in 1870.They had a son and three daughters and lived in Hartford,Connecticut.Here he wrote many of his famous books：The Adventures of Tom.Sawyer（1876）,The Prince and the Pauper(1880）,Life on the Mississippi(1883）,Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(1884） and A Con,necticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court(1889）.Twain also wrote many funny short stories.Mark Twain's books became popular everywhere.People liked his way of writing,and many called him the father of American literature.He changed the American way of writing with his simple,
　　funny language.He died on April 21,1910 at the age of seventy-four.