MARK TWAIN
Samuel Clemens was born on November 30. 1835, in a tiny settlement in Missouri not far from the little town of Hannibal on the banks of the Mississippi River. The family soon moved to Hannibal and there young Sam spent the first fourteen years of his life, the years in which the writer's character and outlook on life began to be formed.
His father died when Sam was not yet twelve years old and the boy had to work to help the family. He became a printer's apprentice and then a journeyman (picture) printer. All his life Twain was very fond of reading. While he was a printer he spent his spare time in libraries and so it came about that he read the works of Poe, Shakespeare, Gold Smith, Dickens, Cervantes, Voltaire and T. Paine in his early youth. It was also while he was a printer that Twain began to write for newspapers an other publications, sending travel letters to them as he journeyed about the country from job to job.
One of Sam Clemen's dreams as a boy had been to pilot a steamboat on the Mississippi. But it cost a lot of money to learn piloting and he knew his family couldn't afford it even if they would have agreed to let him take up such a rough and dangerous profession.
He had been working several years as a printer when one of the best pilots on the Mississippi agreed to teach him his skill. Sam borrowed the necessary money to pay for training from one of his relatives and by 1858 he was piloting a steamboat. In his "Life on the Mississippi" (1883) Mark Twain tells how he became a steamboat pilot. The four years that he worked as a pilot gave Clemens much valuable experience and knowledge of human nature. But most important for him as a future writer were the people he cоme in contact with.
NEW YORK CITY
The eastern United States has a varied topography. A broad, flat coastal plain lines the Atlantic and Gulf shores from the Texas-Mexico border to New York City, and includes the Florida peninsula. Areas further inland feature rolling hills and temperate forests. The Appalachian Mountains form a line of low mountains separating the eastern seaboard from the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Basin.
The Cascades are one of the snowiest places in the world, with some places averaging over 600 inches (1,524 cm) of snow annually, but the lower elevations closer to the coast receive very little snow.
Another significant (but localized) weather effect is lake-effect snow that falls south and east of the Great Lakes, especially in the hilly portions of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and on the Tug Hill Plateau in New York. The lake effect dumped well over 5 feet (1.52 m) of snow in the area of Buffalo, New York throughout the 2006-2007 winter. The Wasatch Front and Wasatch Range in Utah can also receive significant lake effect accumulations from the Great Salt Lake.
In 1607, Captain Henry Hudson left Europe to search for the famous Northwest Passage, a way from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean by boat. He didn't find it, because it didn't exist, but he reached a river to which he gave his name. Interested by the stories told to them by Hudson after his return, the Dutch sent other boats to take possession of the land discovered by Hudson and gave it the name "New Netherland". The Dutch bought the island of Manhattan from the Native Americans in 1626 and built their capital, New Amsterdam, there. In 1664 this territory was taken over by the English and they changed the name of New Amsterdam to New York City. New Netherland became the colony of New York.
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