Mark Twain

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ife and career. Instead of traveling to South America, he persuaded a riverboat pilot named Horace Bixby to teach him the skills of piloting. By April 1859, Twain had become a licensed riverboat pilot.

The profession of riverboat piloting paid well and brought Twain much attention, which he enjoyed. His piloting experiences also allowed him to observe the many kinds of people who traveled aboard the steamboats. He later reported that "in that brief, sharp schooling, I got personally and familiarly acquainted with about all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history."

Newspaper work in the West. The beginning of the American Civil War (1861-1865) abruptly closed commercial traffic on the Mississippi River. After serving for two weeks with a Confederate volunteer company, Twain chose not to become involved in the war. He traveled to Carson City, Nevada, in 1861 with his brother Orion. Later, in Roughing It (1872), Twain humorously described his unsuccessful attempts at prospecting for gold and silver during this time and his eventual conclusion that he must support himself by newspaper journalism. He joined the staff of the Virginia City, Nevada, Territorial Enterprise in the summer of 1862. He first began publishing under his pen name on Feb. 3, 1863, while working for the Enterprise. "Mark Twain" comes from a riverboat term meaning two fathoms (a depth of 12 feet, or 3.7 meters).

Twain next drifted westward to California, where he wrote for the San Francisco Morning Call and a literary journal, the Californian. On Nov. 18, 1865, his first popular story—about "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"—appeared in the New York Saturday Press. In 1866, Twain traveled to the Hawaiian Islands, where he acted as a correspondent for the Sacramento Union. Following his return to San Francisco, he began a p...