Twentieth-century American author William Faulkner called him “the father of American literature.” But few of his compatriots today know of his raucous literary upbringing in a silver-mining boomtown. Unaccomplished and undecided as to his future, he first took up writing as a career in Nevada, and there he adopted a pen name and attracted a readership.
Today, Mark Twain is esteemed as one of our nation’s most revered writers and humorists.
Riches in Words
Samuel Langhorne Clemens set foot in Virginia City to work at the newspaper Territorial Enterprise in September 1862, 15 months after he rode west on the Overland stage with his older brother Orion, the newly appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory. The 26-year-old adventurer spent most of that time prospecting for gold and silver, enduring hard manual labor and wretched quarters, and “living on alkali water and whang leather.”
