Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 in Missouri. He trained and worked as a printer until 1857 when he became an apprentice pilot on the steamboats of the Mississippi River. After a brief spell as a miner in Nevada, he took up journalism and began using the pen name Mark Twain. Some years of traveling and lecturing followed and in 1870 he married and settled in Connecticut where, in 1876, he wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer . The sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , was published eight years later. Candy Gourlay is the author of Tall Story, Bone Talk, and Is It a Mermaid? Tall Story was shortlisted for 13 prizes and nominated for the Carnegie Medal.