Mark Twain

Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, in the tiny village of Florida, Missouri, he was the sixth of seven children in a family that soon relocated to Hannibal, a Mississippi River town whose steamboats, caves, and boyhood adventures would furnish the material for his most enduring fiction. His father died when he was eleven, ending his formal schooling and sending him into a printer’s apprenticeship. He worked as a typesetter, a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi , where he adopted the pen name Mark Twain from the leadsman’s cry for two fathoms of safe water , a Confederate militiaman for two uneasy weeks, a silver miner in Nevada, and a journalist in San Francisco before "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1865) launched his literary career. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) made him famous, but Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) made him immortal, its vernacular narration through the voice of a barely literate boy on a raft transforming American prose and prompting Ernest Hemingway to declare that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." He also wrote Life on the Mississippi (1883), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894). His worldwide lecture tours made him perhaps the most recognizable American alive, yet his final years were shadowed by bankruptcy, the deaths of his wife Olivia and two of his three daughters, and an increasingly bitter pessimism visible in late works like "The War Prayer" and The Mysterious Stranger. He died on April 21, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut, one day after Halley’s Comet reached its closest approach to Earth , just as he had predicted, having been born under the same comet in 1835.