Who Was Mark Twain?

1. Missouri: the boy on the Mississippi

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on 30 November 1835 in the village of Florida, Missouri, the sixth of seven children of John Marshall Clemens, a lawyer and judge, and Jane Lampton Clemens. When Samuel was four, the family moved to Hannibal, a town on the Mississippi River, where his father worked as a judge and a storekeeper. Hannibal was a bustling river port, full of steamboats, traders, enslaved people and runaways, and it became the model for St. Petersburg, the fictional town of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The river, which Samuel watched from the town's bluffs, became the central image of his work: a highway, a hiding place, and a symbol of freedom and of danger.

Samuel's childhood in Hannibal was happy and rough. He played in the caves outside the town, swam in the river, and listened to the stories of the people around him, including the enslaved people who worked in the town and whose speech and stories he absorbed. His father died when Samuel was eleven, and the family fell into poverty. Samuel left school and went to work as a printer's apprentice, first in Hannibal and then in St. Louis, New York and Philadelphia, learning the trade that would support him for the rest of his life. The years as a printer taught him to write quickly, to meet deadlines, and to understand what readers wanted — skills that would serve him well as a journalist and as a novelist.

In 1857, at the age of twenty-one, Clemens decided to become a river pilot on the Mississippi, one of the most prestigious and best-paid jobs in America. He paid for his training by working as a cub pilot, and he earned his licence in 1859. For two years he piloted steamboats up and down the river, learning its channels, its sandbars and its dangers, and memorising the river's changing face. The Civil War ended his career as a pilot in 1861, when river traffic stopped, but the experience never left him. His pen name, Mark Twain, was a river term, the call of the leadsman measuring the depth of the water: mark twain meant two fathoms, or twelve feet, deep enough for safe passage. The name was a claim about who he was: a man of the river, and a man who knew how deep the water was.

2. The West: journalism, the pen name and sudden fame

After the Civil War began, Clemens briefly joined a Confederate militia unit in Missouri, an experience he later mocked in his writings, and then travelled west with his brother Orion, who had been appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory. In Nevada, Clemens tried his hand at silver mining and failed, and then turned to journalism, working for the Territorial Enterprise, a newspaper in Virginia City. It was there, in 1863, that he first used the pen name Mark Twain, in a humorous letter about a local event. The name stuck, and from then on Samuel Clemens the man and Mark Twain the writer were two different people, though they shared a body and a bank account.

Twain's journalism was a mixture of humour, satire and reportage, and it made him famous in the West. He wrote about miners, politicians, and the absurdities of frontier life, and he developed a style that was direct, funny, and apparently artless — the voice of a plain-spoken American who was not fooled by pretension. In 1865 he wrote a short story, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, about a man who bets on a frog that can jump further than any other frog, and loses when his opponent fills the frog with shot. The story was reprinted across the United States and in England, and it made Twain famous nationally. He was thirty years old, and he had found his voice.

In 1867 Twain travelled to Europe and the Holy Land as a correspondent for a San Francisco newspaper, and the letters he wrote became his first book, The Innocents Abroad, published in 1869. The book was a huge success: it mocked American tourists, European guides, and the reverence with which travellers treated the sights of the Old World, and it did so in a voice that was fresh, irreverent and unmistakably American. The book made Twain a wealthy man and established him as one of the most popular writers in the country. It also showed the pattern of his career: he would take a subject — a journey, a river, a boyhood — and write about it in a way that made it seem both familiar and new, and he would do it in language that ordinary readers could enjoy.

3. Hartford: marriage, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn

In 1870 Twain married Olivia Langdon, the daughter of a wealthy coal merchant from Elmira, New York, and the couple settled in Hartford, Connecticut, in a large house that Twain built in 1874. The Hartford years, from 1871 to 1891, were the most productive of his life, and the house became a centre of literary life, visited by writers, actors and politicians. Twain and Olivia had four children, three daughters and a son who died in infancy, and the family life in Hartford was happy, though it was shadowed by illness and by Twain's restless temperament. He wrote in a study on the top floor of the house, and he worked in the mornings, often in bed, dictating to a secretary or writing in longhand.

The first of the two great novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, was published in 1876. It tells the story of a boy growing up in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, Missouri, a town modelled on Hannibal, and it is a book about boyhood: about whitewashing a fence, about running away to an island, about getting lost in a cave, and about the small adventures that seem enormous to a child. The book was an immediate success, and it has been read by children and adults ever since. But it is also a book about a particular America — a small town on the Mississippi in the years before the Civil War, where slavery was a fact of life and where a boy could be both innocent and cruel, often in the same afternoon.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884 in England and 1885 in the United States, is a darker and greater book. It follows Tom Sawyer's friend Huck, who runs away from his abusive father and travels down the Mississippi on a raft with Jim, an enslaved man who is seeking his freedom. The novel is told in Huck's voice, in the vernacular of the Mississippi Valley, and it is that voice — direct, funny, and morally serious — that makes the book revolutionary. Huck's journey is also a moral journey: he begins by believing what his society has taught him, that helping an enslaved man to escape is a sin, and he ends by deciding that he would rather go to hell than betray his friend. The book's final line, in which Huck decides to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, has become one of the most famous endings in American literature.

4. Why Huckleberry Finn changed literature

The importance of Huckleberry Finn is hard to overstate, and it has been argued about ever since it was published. Ernest Hemingway famously wrote that all modern American literature comes from one book, Huckleberry Finn, and that everything written after it was an imitation or an elaboration. The claim is an exaggeration, but it captures something true: Twain was the first American writer to use the ordinary speech of ordinary people as the language of serious literature, and to show that a novel could be written in a voice that was not formal, not British, and not literary in the old sense. The American novel after Twain — from Hemingway and Faulkner to the writers of today — owes a debt to Huck's voice, and to Twain's demonstration that American English was a language fit for art.

The novel's treatment of race is the reason it is still argued about. Twain uses a racial slur repeatedly, because it was the language of the time and place he was writing about, and because he was writing in the voice of a boy who had grown up hearing it. That language has led to the book being challenged and removed from some school reading lists, and to debates about whether it should be taught to children. Defenders of the book argue that it is, in its meaning, an anti-racist novel: it shows Jim as a human being of dignity and feeling, and it shows Huck learning to see him as a friend and an equal, in defiance of everything his society has taught him. Critics reply that the language, whatever its purpose, causes real harm to readers, and that a book that uses it so freely is unsuitable for classroom use, particularly for young Black readers. The debate continues, and it is unlikely to be settled, because it is really a debate about two different things: the history of a book, and the experience of reading it now.

What is not in doubt is that Huckleberry Finn is a great book, and that it changed what a novel could do. It showed that a story about a boy and an enslaved man on a raft could be a serious work of literature, and that the language of the Mississippi Valley was as fit for art as the language of London. It also showed that a novel could be both funny and morally serious, and that humour could be a way of telling the truth about a society that did not want to hear it. Those lessons have shaped American literature ever since, and they are the reason the book is still read, still taught, and still argued about.

5. Business failure, lecturing and the later years

Twain's success as a writer did not make him a successful businessman. In the 1880s and 1890s he invested heavily in a typesetting machine, a device that promised to revolutionise printing, and in a publishing company that he founded to publish his own books and those of other writers, including the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, which were a great success. The typesetting machine failed, the publishing company failed, and by 1894 Twain was bankrupt, owing a large sum of money to his creditors. He could have declared bankruptcy and walked away, but he chose instead to pay his debts in full, and to do so by embarking on a lecture tour around the world that would take him to Australia, India, South Africa and England.

The lecture tour, which began in 1895, was a triumph. Twain was one of the most famous men in the world, and audiences came in their thousands to hear him read from his books and to tell stories. He was a brilliant performer, with a slow, deliberate delivery and a deadpan humour that audiences loved, and the tour made him enough money to pay his debts and to restore his fortune. The tour also produced a book, Following the Equator, published in 1897, in which Twain wrote about the British Empire, about India, and about the injustices of colonial rule. The book is one of his most serious works, and it shows a Twain who had grown angrier and more sceptical with age, and who was willing to criticise the powerful in public.

The last years of Twain's life were marked by loss. His wife Olivia died in 1904, his daughter Susy had died in 1896, and his daughter Jean died in 1909, the year before his own death. He became increasingly bitter in his writings, producing works that were darker and more pessimistic than the novels of his middle years, including The Mysterious Stranger, a philosophical tale about the nature of evil, which was published after his death. He also wrote an autobiography, which he dictated in his final years and instructed should not be published until a hundred years after his death, because it contained opinions that he did not want to express in his lifetime. The autobiography was finally published in 2010, and it showed a Twain who was as funny, as angry, and as honest as ever.

6. The humorist who was angry

Twain is often remembered as a humorist, a writer of funny stories about boys and frogs, but that reputation misses the anger that runs through his work. He was angry about slavery, and Huckleberry Finn is, among other things, an attack on a society that could treat a human being as property. He was angry about imperialism, and his writings about the American war in the Philippines and about the British Empire are among the fiercest anti-imperialist writings of his time. He was angry about religious hypocrisy, about greed, and about the cruelty of human beings to one another, and his humour was often a way of expressing that anger without being dismissed as a preacher. The jokes were the surface; underneath them was a moral seriousness that his readers sometimes missed.

That anger grew in his later years, and it changed his writing. The Twain of the 1890s and 1900s was a darker figure than the Twain of Tom Sawyer, and his later works — including the essays he wrote about the Philippines, about lynching in the American South, and about the corruption of politics — are among the most powerful things he wrote. He was, in his own words, a man who had lost his faith in human progress, and who believed that human beings were capable of great cruelty and great folly. But he never lost his humour, and he never stopped believing that the truth, told plainly and with a joke, was worth telling. That combination — anger and humour, seriousness and laughter — is what makes him unique, and it is why his work still feels modern.

Twain's influence on American writing is incalculable. He showed that American English was a literary language, that a novel could be written in the voice of a boy on a raft, and that humour could be a serious form of criticism. Writers as different as Hemingway, Faulkner, and the humorists of the twentieth century all learned from him, and his books are still read, still taught, and still adapted for stage and screen. His house in Hartford is now a museum, and his birthplace in Florida, Missouri, is preserved as a historic site. The Mississippi River, which he wrote about for his whole life, still flows past Hannibal, and the town still celebrates the boy who grew up there and who made it famous.

7. Death, the comet, and the legacy

Twain died on 21 April 1910 at his home in Redding, Connecticut, at the age of seventy-four, of heart disease. He had been born in 1835, the year of Halley's Comet, and he had predicted that he would die when the comet returned. In 1909 he said that he had come in with the comet and would go out with it, and Halley's Comet appeared again in the spring of 1910, the year of his death. The coincidence has become one of the most famous facts about him, and it is a fitting end to a life that was itself a kind of performance: a man who arrived with a comet and left with one, and who made the whole world laugh in between.

Twain's legacy is secure, but it is also contested, and that is as it should be. Huckleberry Finn is still the great American novel, and it is still challenged in schools. Tom Sawyer is still read by children, and it is still criticised for its portrayal of the world it depicts. Twain himself is still admired as a humorist and still argued about as a moralist. The debates are a sign of his importance: a writer who is only praised is a writer who is no longer being read, and Twain is still being read, still being argued about, and still being enjoyed, more than a century after his death.

The biography on this site gives the verified facts of his life. The best way to meet Twain is to read him, and the best place to start is Huckleberry Finn, read slowly, in Huck's voice, on a quiet afternoon. It is a book that rewards patience, and it is a book that changes as the reader changes: a child reads it as an adventure, an adult reads it as a moral argument, and a reader who returns to it after many years finds that it has grown with them. That is the mark of a great book, and it is the reason Mark Twain is still, more than a hundred years after his death, the most American of writers.

Frequently asked questions

Sources and further reading

• Encyclopaedia Britannica — Mark Twain
• Wikipedia — Mark Twain
• The Mark Twain House and Museum — About Twain
• Library of Congress — Mark Twain

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• Who Was A. P. J. Abdul Kalam? — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam rose from a poor boyhood in Rameswaram to lead India's space and missile programmes, then served as the country's 11th president.
• Who Was Abdul Sattar Edhi? — Abdul Sattar Edhi built Pakistan's largest welfare network from a single free dispensary. This explains his life, his foundation and his legacy.
• Who Was Abdus Salam? — Abdus Salam won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics for unifying two forces of nature. This explains his science, his institutions and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Abraham Lincoln? — Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union through the Civil War and ended slavery. This explains his rise, his presidency and his contested legacy.
• Who Was Ada Lovelace? — Ada Lovelace published the first program for a programmable machine in 1843. This explains her notes, her vision of computing and the debate over her role.
• Who Was Adolf Hitler? — Adolf Hitler led the Nazi Party and ruled Germany as dictator from 1933 to 1945, started the Second World War in Europe and was central to the Holocaust.
• Who Was Alan Turing? — Alan Turing defined modern computing, broke German naval Enigma and proposed the Turing test. This explains his science, his war work and his tragic end.
• Who Was Albert Einstein? — Albert Einstein rewrote physics with relativity and won the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect. This explains his ideas, his life and his legacy.
• Who Was Alexander Graham Bell? — Alexander Graham Bell patented the first practical telephone in 1876. This explains his work with the deaf, the patent fight and his wider inventions.
• Who Was Alexander the Great? — Alexander the Great built one of history's largest empires before dying at 32. This explains his conquests, his cities and the debate over his legacy.
• Who Was Alfred Nobel? — Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, held 355 patents and founded the Nobel Prizes. This explains his explosives empire, his will and the prizes' legacy.
• Who Was Allama Iqbal? — Allama Iqbal was Pakistan's national poet, whose ideas shaped the case for Pakistan. This explains his poetry, his philosophy and his legacy.
• Who Was Benazir Bhutto? — Benazir Bhutto was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority country, serving as prime minister of Pakistan in 1988-90 and 1993-96.
• Who Was Bob Marley? — Bob Marley took reggae from Jamaica to the world and became a symbol of peace, resistance and unity. This explains his life, his music and his legacy.
• Who Was Bruce Lee? — Bruce Lee was the martial artist and actor who carried Hong Kong action cinema to the world and founded Jeet Kune Do, leaving a lasting influence.
• Who Was Charles Darwin? — Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, published in On the Origin of Species in 1859, became the foundation of modern biology.
• Who Was Charles Dickens? — Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist of the Victorian era, whose serialised novels mixed comedy, social criticism and unforgettable characters.
• Who Was Charlie Chaplin? — Charlie Chaplin created the Little Tramp, the most famous screen character of the silent era, and directed classics City Lights and The Great Dictator.
• Who Was Cleopatra? — Cleopatra VII was the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, a multilingual stateswoman who kept her kingdom independent for 21 years before Rome annexed it.
• Who Was Diego Maradona? — Diego Maradona was an Argentine footballer who captained Argentina to the 1986 World Cup and is widely regarded as one of the greatest players in history.
• Who Was Don Bradman? — Don Bradman was an Australian cricketer who averaged 99.94 in Test cricket, a record so far ahead of any other batsman that it remains famous in sport.
• Who Was Elvis Presley? — Elvis Presley took gospel, country and rhythm and blues and turned them into rock and roll, becoming the most famous singer of his century.
• Who Was Emily Dickinson? — Emily Dickinson was an American poet who wrote nearly 1,800 poems in private in Amherst, Massachusetts, and was barely published in her lifetime.
• Who Was Faiz Ahmed Faiz? — Faiz Ahmed Faiz was Pakistan's most celebrated modern Urdu poet, whose verse joined romantic lyricism with resistance to injustice.
• Who Was Franz Beckenbauer? — Franz Beckenbauer was a German footballer known as Der Kaiser, who won the World Cup as captain in 1974 and as manager in 1990.
• Who Was Freddie Mercury? — Freddie Mercury was the lead singer of Queen, a four-octave voice and fearless showman who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions.
• Who Was Frida Kahlo? — Frida Kahlo was a Mexican painter known for uncompromising, brilliantly coloured self-portraits exploring identity, the body and death.
• Who Was Galileo Galilei? — Galileo Galilei reshaped astronomy with his telescopic discoveries of 1610, defended a Sun-centred universe, and was tried by the Inquisition in 1633.
• Who Was Genghis Khan? — Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and built the largest contiguous land empire in history, a conqueror and lawgiver whose legacy is still argued over.
• Who Was George Washington? — George Washington won American independence, presided over the Constitutional Convention, and as first president defined the office — then walked away.
• Who Was Guglielmo Marconi? — Guglielmo Marconi was an Italian inventor who built the first practical wireless telegraph and sent the first transatlantic radio signal in 1901.
• Who Was Henry Ford? — Henry Ford was an American industrialist who founded the Ford Motor Company, built the Model T and perfected the moving assembly line.
• Who Was Isaac Newton? — Isaac Newton wrote the laws of motion and universal gravitation, invented calculus and transformed optics, leaving a lasting legacy in science.
• Who Was James Watt? — James Watt did not invent the steam engine, but his separate condenser of 1765 made it efficient enough to power the Industrial Revolution.
• Who Was Jane Austen? — Jane Austen published six novels in her lifetime, anonymously, and died at 41. This explains her life, her novels, her irony and her growing reputation.
• Who Was Jesus Christ? — Jesus of Nazareth is the central figure of Christianity, the world's largest religion. This explains his life in the Gospels, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Johan Cruyff? — Johan Cruyff was the star of Total Football, won three Ballon d'Or awards, and as a manager built the Barcelona team that shaped modern football.
• Who Was Johannes Gutenberg? — Johannes Gutenberg built the first mechanised printing press in Europe and printed the Gutenberg Bible around 1455, changing how the world shared ideas.
• Who Was John Keats? — John Keats died of tuberculosis in Rome at 25, having written his six great odes in a single year. This explains his short life, his poetry and his fame.
• Who Was Joseph Stalin? — Joseph Stalin led the Soviet Union from the 1920s until 1953, industrialised the country and led it through the Second World War, ruling through terror.
• Who Was Julius Caesar? — Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, crossed the Rubicon and remade Rome's calendar and government, and was murdered by senators who feared he would be king.
• Who Was Kobe Bryant? — Kobe Bryant won five NBA championships with the Los Angeles Lakers and became known for the Mamba Mentality, on and off the court.
• Who Was Leo Tolstoy? — Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, then abandoned literary fame for a radical moral philosophy that influenced Gandhi and the world.
• Who Was Leonardo da Vinci? — Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper and filled notebooks with anatomy and engineering, becoming the symbol of the Renaissance.
• Who Was Ludwig van Beethoven? — Ludwig van Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, 32 piano sonatas and the Missa Solemnis, much of it while deaf. This explains his life and legacy.
• Who Was Mahatma Gandhi? — Mahatma Gandhi led India to independence through nonviolent resistance, and his ideas shaped civil-rights movements worldwide.
• Who Was Mao Zedong? — Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in 1949 and led it until 1976, bringing unification and the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution.
• Who Was Margaret Thatcher? — Margaret Thatcher was the first woman to serve as British prime minister, leading the UK from 1979 to 1990 through reform, the Falklands War and division.
• Who Was Marie Curie? — Marie Curie discovered polonium and radium and remains the only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, a pioneer of radioactivity research.
• Who Was Marilyn Monroe? — Marilyn Monroe was the biggest star of the 1950s, the blonde bombshell of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot, who fought the studio system.
• Who Was Maya Angelou? — Maya Angelou was a poet, memoirist and civil rights activist whose autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings made her widely read.
• Who Was Michael Jackson? — Michael Jackson, the King of Pop, made Thriller, the best-selling album in history, and changed music video, dance and pop stardom.
• Who Was Mirza Ghalib? — Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) is the pre-eminent Urdu and Persian poet of the last Mughal era, whose ghazals on love, loss and doubt are still recited.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali Jinnah? — Muhammad Ali Jinnah was the barrister and statesman who led the All-India Muslim League and became Pakistan's first Governor-General in 1947.
• Who Was Muhammad Ali? — Muhammad Ali was the three-time heavyweight champion who called himself The Greatest, and the most famous athlete of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Napoleon Bonaparte? — Napoleon Bonaparte rose from Corsica to Emperor of the French, redrew the map of Europe, and left a legal code that still shapes law across the world.
• Who Was Nelson Mandela? — Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison under apartheid, then became South Africa's first democratically elected president and a Nobel Peace laureate.
• Who Was Nikola Tesla? — Nikola Tesla developed the alternating-current power system, the induction motor and the Tesla coil, making long-distance electric power practical.
• Who Was Osama bin Laden? — Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 and organised the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which nearly 3,000 people were killed.
• Who Was Pablo Neruda? — Pablo Neruda was Chile's great poet, a Nobel laureate, a communist senator and a diplomat. This explains his poetry, his politics and his death.
• Who Was Pablo Picasso? — Pablo Picasso co-founded Cubism, painted Guernica, and spent 75 years breaking the rules of art — the most influential artist of the twentieth century.
• Who Was Pelé? — Pele is the only footballer to win three World Cups, the youngest winner, and the game's first global icon. This is his life, his goals and his legacy.
• Who Was Pope Francis? The People's Pope — Pope Francis, the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit pope, led the Catholic Church from 2013 to 2025 with an emphasis on mercy and the poor.
• Who Was Prophet Muhammad? — The Prophet Muhammad is the founder of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. This explains his life, his teachings and his legacy.
• Who Was Queen Elizabeth II? — Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years, from 1952 to 2022 — the longest reign in British history. This explains her life, her reign and her legacy.
• Who Was Rabindranath Tagore? — Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the author of the national anthems of India and Bangladesh.
• Who Was Rosa Parks? — Rosa Parks was not a tired seamstress who acted on impulse. She was a trained activist and NAACP secretary whose bus refusal was a deliberate act.
• Who Was Rosalind Franklin? — Rosalind Franklin's X-ray image, Photograph 51, gave Watson and Crick the key evidence for the double helix. This is her life and the credit debate.
• Who Was Rumi? — Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet of Konya, wrote the Masnavi and the Divan-e Shams, and became the most widely read poet in the world.
• Who Was Shane Warne? — Shane Warne took 708 Test wickets, bowled the Ball of the Century in 1993 and won the 1999 World Cup with Australia. This explains his career.
• Who Was Stephen Hawking? — Stephen Hawking was a theoretical physicist who showed that black holes emit radiation and wrote A Brief History of Time. He died in 2018, aged 76.
• Who Was Steve Jobs? — Steve Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976, was forced out in 1985, built Pixar, and returned to launch the iMac, iPod, iPhone and iPad. He died in 2011, aged 56.
• Who Was Thomas Edison? — Thomas Edison held 1,093 US patents, invented the phonograph and the practical incandescent lamp, and built the first commercial electric power system.
• Who Was Vincent van Gogh? — Vincent van Gogh produced about 2,100 artworks in a single decade, including The Starry Night and Sunflowers, and became famous only after his death at 37.
• Who Was William Shakespeare? — William Shakespeare is the most performed playwright in history, yet almost nothing is reliably known about his private life.
• Who Was William Wordsworth? — William Wordsworth launched English Romanticism with Lyrical Ballads and wrote The Prelude, the great autobiographical poem. This explains his life.
• Who Was Winston Churchill? — Winston Churchill led Britain through the Second World War and won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his record on empire is still debated.
• Who Was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart? — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a child prodigy who composed more than 600 works before his death at 35, defining the Classical era.
• Why Van Gogh Became Famous After Death — Vincent van Gogh died in 1890 almost unknown, and within a few decades his paintings were among the most loved in the world.