Mark Twain

Samuel Clemens was the sixth of seven children born to Jane and John Marshall Clemens. Unfortunately, only three of Clemens’s siblings survived to adulthood. The Clemens family moved from Florida, Missouri to Hannibal, Missouri when Clemens was four years old. Clemens loved his home near the Mississippi River—later, his childhood in Hannibal would be the inspiration for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Tragedy struck in 1847 when John Clemens died, leaving Jane and their children to struggle to make enough money. Clemens left school after the fifth grade to work as a typesetter and it was at this time that he began submitting articles and sketches to the newspapers. The articles were a success, and Clemens went on to write for major publications in Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. As much as he loved writing, Clemens dreamed of being a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River and successfully earned his license with the help of another pilot named Horace E. Bixby. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Clemens briefly joined the Confederacy but quickly changed his mind and moved to Nevada to work for his other brother. Clemens traveled around the American West, working as a miner and gathering inspiration for his fiction. In 1865, Twain published a story called “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” The story was an instant success and opened up new doors to Clemens: a local newspaper paid for him to take a tour of Europe, which inspired his book Innocents Abroad (1869) and led him to meet his future wife, Olivia Langdon. After Clemens and Oliva married, they moved to Hartford, Connecticut where Olivia introduced Clemens to abolitionists like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass. During the 17 years Clemens lived in Hartford, he wrote some of his most notable works, including Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and The Prince and the Pauper. The couple had four children, but their only son died before his second birthday. Between 1896 and 1909, Olivia and two of their remaining children died, leaving Clemens in a deep state of depression. In 1907 Clemens was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Letters from Oxford University and he continued to enjoy immense popularity among American readers. In 1909, however, Clemens predicted he’d die when Halley’s Comet reached its nearest approach to Earth (coincidentally, he was born immediately after the comet’s last sighting close to earth in 1835). Sure enough, the day after the comet made its nearest approach to Earth in 1910, Clemens died of a heart attack. He was buried with his wife and children in Elmira, New York.