He died in his Connecticut mansion, Stormfield, on April 21, 1910.

THE WORLD OF MARK TWAIN AND ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN

1835 Samuel Langhorne Clemens is born prematurely in Florida, Mis souri, the fourth child of John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lamp ton Clemens.
1839 The family moves to Hannibal, the small Missouri town on the west bank of the Mississippi River that will become the model for the setting of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
1840 American newspapers gain increased readership as urban popu lations swell and printing technology improves.
1847 John Clemens dies, leaving the family in financial difficulty. Sam quits school at the age of twelve.
1848 Sam becomes a full-time apprentice to Joseph Ament of the Mis souri Courier.
1850 Sam’s brother Orion, ten years his senior, returns to Hannibal and establishes the Journal; he hires Sam as a compositor. Steam boats become the primary means of transport on the Mississippi River.
1852 Sam edits the failing Journal while Orion is away. After he reads local humor published in newspapers in New England and the Southwest, Sam begins printing his own humorous sketches in the Journal. He submits “The Dandy Frightening the Squatter” to the Carpet-Bag of Boston, which publishes the sketch in the May issue.
1853 Sam leaves Hannibal and begins working as an itinerant printer; he visits St. Louis, New York, and Philadelphia. His brothers Orion and Henry move to Iowa with their mother.
1854 Transcendentalism flourishes in American literary culture; Henry David Thoreau publishes Walden.
1855 Sam works again as a printer with Orion in Keokuk, Iowa.
1856 Sam acquires a commission from Keokuk’s Daily Post to write humorous letters; he decides to travel to South America.
1857 Sam takes a steamer to New Orleans, where he hopes to find a ship bound for South America. Instead, he signs on as an ap prentice to river pilot Horace Bixby and spends the next two years learning how to navigate a steamship up and down the Missis sippi. His experiences become material for Life on the Mississippi and his tales of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.
1858 Sam’s brother Henry dies in a steamboat accident.
1859 Samuel Clemens becomes a fully licensed river pilot.
1861 The American Civil War erupts, putting an abrupt stop to river trade between North and South. Sam serves with a Confederate militia for two weeks before venturing to the Nevada Territory with Orion, who had been appointed by President Abraham Lin coln as secretary of the new Territory.
1862 After an unsuccessful stint as a miner and prospector for gold and silver, Clemens begins reporting for the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada.
1863 Clemens signs his name as “Mark Twain” on a humorous travel sketch printed in the Territorial Enterprise. The pseudonym, a riverboat term meaning “two fathoms deep,” connotes barely nav igable water.
1864 After challenging his editor to a duel, Twain is forced to leave Nevada and lands a job with a San Francisco newspaper. He meets Artemus Ward, a popular humorist, whose techniques greatly influence Twain’s writing.
1865 Robert E. Lee’s army surrenders, ending the Civil War. While prospecting for gold in Calaveras County, California, Twain hears a tale he uses for a story that makes him famous; originally titled “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” it is published in New York’s Saturday Press.
1866 Twain travels to Hawaii as a correspondent for the Sacramento Union; upon his return to California, he delivers his first public lecture, beginning a successful career as a humorous speaker.
1867 Twain travels to New York, and then to Europe and the Holy Land aboard the steamer Quaker City; during five months abroad, he contributes to California’s largest paper, Sacramento’s Alta California, and writes several letters for the New York Tribune.
He publishes a volume of stories and sketches, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches.
1868 Twain meets and falls in love with Olivia (Livy) Langdon. His overseas writings have increased his popularity; he signs his first book contract and begins The Innocents Abroad, sketches based on his trip to the Holy Land. He embarks on a lecture tour of the American Midwest.
1869 Twain becomes engaged to Livy, who acts as his editor from that time on. The Innocents Abroad, published as a subscription book, is an instant success, selling nearly 100,000 copies in the first three years.
1870 Twain and Livy marry. Their son, Langdon, is born; he lives only two years.
1871 The Clemens move to Hartford, Connecticut.
1872 Roughing It, an account of Twain’s adventures out West, is pub lished to enormous success. The first of Twain’s three daughters, Susy, is born. Twain strikes up a lifelong friendship with the writer William Dean Howells.
1873 Ever the entrepreneur, Twain receives the patent for Mark Twain’s Self-Pasting Scrapbook, an invention that is a commercial success. He publishes The Gilded Age, a collaboration with his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner that satirizes the post-Civil War era.
1874 His daughter Clara is born. The family moves into a mansion in Hartford in which they will live for the next seventeen years.
1876 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is published.
1877 Twain collaborates with Bret Harte—an author known for his use of local color and humor and for his parodies of Cooper, Dickens, and Hugo—to produce the play Ah Sin.
1880 Twain invests in the Paige typesetter and loses thousands of dol lars. He publishes A Tramp Abroad, an account of his travels in Europe the two previous years. His daughter Jean is born.
1881 The Prince and the Pauper, Twain’s first historical romance, is published.
1882 Twain plans to write about the Mississippi River and makes the trip from New Orleans to Minnesota to refresh his memory.
1883 The nonfiction work Life on the Mississippi is published.
1884 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a book Twain worked on for
nearly ten years, is published in England; publication in the United States is delayed until the following year because an il lustration plate is judged to be obscene.
1885 When Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is published in America—by Twain’s ill-fated publishing house, run by his nephew Charles Webster—controversy immediately surrounds the book. Twain also publishes the memoirs of his friend former President Ulysses S. Grant.
1888 Twain earns his Master of Arts degree from Yale University.
1889 He publishes A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the first of his major works to be informed by a deep pessimism. He meets Rudyard Kipling, who had come to America to meet Twain, in Livy’s hometown of Elmira, New York.
1890 Twain’s mother dies.
1891 Financial difficulties force the Clemens family to close their Hart ford mansion; they move to Berlin, Germany.
1894 The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, a dark novel about the after math of slavery, is published and sells well; nonetheless, Twain’s publishing company fails and leaves him bankrupt.
1895 Twain embarks on an ambitious worldwide lecture tour to restore his financial position.
1896 His daughter Susy dies of spinal meningitis.
1901 Twain is awarded an honorary doctorate degree from Yale.
1902 Livy falls gravely ill. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, a stage ad aptation of the novel, opens to favorable reviews. Though he is credited with coauthorship, Twain has little to do with the play and never sees it performed. He receives an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Missouri.
1903 Hoping to restore Livy’s health, Twain takes her to Florence, Italy.
1904 Livy dies, leaving Twain devastated. He begins dictating an un even autobiography that he never finishes.
1905 Theodore Roosevelt invites Twain to the White House. Twain enjoys a gala celebrating his seventieth birthday in New York.