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Text 1B. My biography

after Mark Twain

I was born on the 30th of November, 1835, in the village of Florida, Missouri. My father was John Marshal Clemens.

According to tradition some of my great-great parents were pirates and slave traders − a respectable trade in the 16th century. In my time I wished to be a pirate myself.

Florida contained a hundred people and when I was born I increased the population by one per cent. It had two streets and a lot of lanes. Both the streets and the lanes were paved with the same material − black mud in wet times, deep dust in dry. Most of the houses were of wood − there were none of brick and none of stone. Everywhere around were fields and woods. My uncle was a farmer. I have never met a better man than he was. He was a middle-aged man whose head was clear and whose heart was honest and simple. I stayed at his house for three months every year till I was thirteen years old. Nowhere else was I happier than at his house. He had eight children and owned about fourteen Negro slaves whom he had bought from other farmers. My uncle and everyone on the farm treated the slaves kindly. All the Negroes on the farm were friends of ours and with those of our own age we were playmates. Since my childhood I have learned to like the black race and admire some of its fine qualities. In my school days nobody told me that it was wrong to sell and buy people. It is only much later that I realized all the horror of slavery.

The country school was three miles from my uncle's farm. It stood in a forest and could take in about twenty five boys and girls. We attended school once or twice a week. I was a sickly child and lived mainly on medicine the first seven years of my life.

When I was twelve years old my father died. After my father's death our family was left penniless. I was taken from school at once and placed in the office of a local newspaper as printer's apprentice where I could receive board and clothes but no money.

For ten years I worked in printshops of various cities. I started my journalistic life as a reporter on a newspaper in San Francisco. It was then that I began to sign my publications by my penname Mark Twain.