Author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is one of the greatest American writers. Mark Twain is the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born in Missouri (1835). A fifth child, out of six children, to his parents, he fell ill at a young age and risked his life. During his childhood, two of his siblings died, and when he was 12, his father died. In his youth, he worked in various jobs to support the family financially, and during the civil war he served as a soldier and documented his experiences in the book Private History of a Campaign that Failed. Twain wrote travel books, essays, short stories, and nonfiction. Since its publication in 1884, Adventures of Huckleberry Fin was considered as “the Great American Novel.” Twain died in 1910 at the age of 74 and was buried in New York State.