SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS, the most popular of all American humorists, was born at Florida, Missouri, November 30th, 1835. At the age of thirteen, he began in a country printing office the course of higher education which he has since continued with such notable results. In 1851, having taken his degree in the printing trade, he began a post-graduate course as a pilot on the Mississippi River, acquiring thus not only the experience which has been invaluable to him as a humorist, but the name he has made so celebrated in America and Europe that, unless it is put upon his monuments, the honorable family name he inherited will scarcely be sufficient to identify him. After several years on the river, he went to Nevada and California, experimenting in mining and journalism, and in 1866 making a visit to the Sandwich Islands. His career as a humorist may be dated more or less inexactly from a series of humorous lectures on Western Life which belong to this period. His first volume, “The Jumping Frog and Other Sketches,” was published after his return to the East in 1867. Its success was immediate, but it was greatly surpassed by that of “Innocents Abroad” (1869) and “Roughing It” (1872). “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” “A Tramp Abroad,” “The Prince and the Pauper,” “Life on the Mississippi,” “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court,” and other works, following in rapid succession, have not exhausted his remarkable fertility, and he continues to maintain the quality of his literary output.

  The serious purpose which crops out from time to time in nearly everything Mr. Clemens writes is hatred of humbug,—a feeling so genuine and deep seated with him that it nerved him for the impossible task of writing down the love of “Chivalry,” which makes a Western cowboy who has read “Ivanhoe” imagine he is a paladin as he races his broncho at full speed down the main street of the town, with all the dogs barking and all the saloon loungers cheering him. Undoubtedly, there are times when Mr. Clemens takes himself seriously as a reformer, but after having educated the public to laugh at everything he does or says, it is of course quite useless for him to attempt seriousness.