Mark Twain
1835–1910
America's foremost humorist and novelist, an intimate of the Gilder salon.
Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, and raised on the Mississippi in Hannibal, Mark Twain piloted steamboats, prospected in the Nevada silver fields, and worked as a newspaperman in San Francisco before The Innocents Abroad (1869) made him the most famous American writer of his time. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) followed, securing his place as the founding voice of modern American prose.
Twain coined the phrase "the Gilded Age" in his 1873 novel of the same name, co-written with Charles Dudley Warner — a phrase that would later name the era his friends the Gilders helped define.
He was a close and constant friend of Richard Watson Gilder, whose Century Magazine serialized Huckleberry Finn and championed Twain's later work. Twain visited the Gilders at their summer place in Tyringham, the property that became Four Brooks Farm, and his letters to Richard and Helena are among the warmest of his vast correspondence — full of the affection of a man who had found, in their household, one of the few salons in America where wit, conscience, and art were taken with equal seriousness.