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 published to enormous success. The first of Twain’s three daughters, Susie, 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 dollars. 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 illustration 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  He receives an honorary 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 Hartford mansion; they move to Berlin, Germany. 
 1894  Twain publishes The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, a dark novel about the aftermath of slavery, which sells well, and Tom Sawyer Abroad,  which does not. Twain’s publishing company fails and leaves him bankrupt.
 1895  Twain embarks on an ambitious worldwide lecture tour to restore his financial position. 
 1896  He publishes Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and Tom Sawyer, Detective.  His daughter Susie 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 adaptation of the novel, opens to favorable reviews. Though he is credited with coauthorship, Twain has little to do with
 1903  the play and never sees it performed. He receives an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Missouri. Hoping to restore Livy’s health, Twain takes her to Florence, Italy. 
 1904  Livy dies, leaving Twain devastated. He begins dictating an uneven 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. He continues to lecture, and he addresses Congress on copyright issues. 
 1906  Twain’s biographer Albert Bigelow Paine moves in with the family. 
 1907  Twain travels to Oxford University to receive an honorary Doctor of Letters degree. 
 1908  He settles in Redding, Connecticut, at Stormfield, the mansion that is his final home. 
 1909  Twain’s daughter Clara marries; the author dons his Oxford robe for the ceremony. His daughter Jean dies. 
 1910  Twain travels to Bermuda for his health. He develops heart problems and, upon his return to Stormfield, dies, leaving behind a cache of unpublished work. 

INTRODUCTION

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30,1835, in the tiny Missouri town of Florida. It was only some years later, when Sam was four, that the family moved to the town Sam Clemens as Mark Twain would one day make famous—Hannibal, Missouri. In the 1830s and ’40s Hannibal was not too far from being the very edge of American civilization—if it was not the frontier, it was very close to it. There was certainly nothing in this hardscrabble town on the banks of the Mississippi River that suggested it would one day produce one of the greatest American writers of all time. It is even stranger to think that a man from a rural Missouri town would one day write a novel detailing the grandeur and the squalor of Tudor England. Yet by the time Sam Clemens, from Hannibal, became Mark Twain, world-famous author and friend to the rich and powerful, he was more than ready to write such a novel. Not only that, he relished the writing of it and counted it among his finest works.

Mark Twain summarized the action of The Prince and the Pauper thusly:

It begins at 9am, January 27th, 1547, seventeen and a half hours before the death of Henry the Eighth and involves the swapping of clothes and places, between the prince of Wales and a pauper boy of the same age and countenance (and half as much learning and still more genius and imagination) and after that the rightful small king has a rough time among the tramps and ruffians in the country parts of Kent, while the small bogus king has a gilded and worshipped and dreary and restrained and cussed time of it on the throne ... (Twain, M. The Prince and the Pauper, introduction by V.