Birth name: Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Nickname (name change): Mark Twain, Thomas Jefferson SnodgrassOccupation: Novelist
Birth date: November 30, 1835
Birth place: Florida, Mo.
Death date: April 21, 1910
Death place: Redding, Conn.
Burial location: Woodlawn Cemetery, Elmira, N.Y.
Spouse: Olivia Langdon
Children: Langdon Clemens, Susy Clemens, Clara Clemens, Jean Clemens
★ Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist.
★ He is most noted for his novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "the Great American Novel."
★ In 1857 at age 22, Clemens decided he wanted to be a steamboat pilot. He studied the Mississippi River painstakingly for two years before receiving his license in 1859. He continued to pilot steamboats until 1861, when the civil war broke out.
★ The pseudonym Mark Twain, meant “two fathoms deep” on the Mississippi, and was called out on the steamboat to indicate the boat was in sufficiently deep water. Clemens first used the name in a publication on February 3, 1863, in a piece he contributed to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.
★ Twain received a Doctorate in Letters from Oxford University in 1907
★ Twain was a successful lecturer, generating money and fame via speaking tours throughout the United States and Europe.
★ Twain made lots of money, but he lost most of it. He was as bad at investing as he was good at writing, and he eventually had to declare bankruptcy.
★ Twain was very interested in parapsychology; he foresaw his brother Henry’s death in a vivid and detailed dream (which came to pass) and even predicted the timing of his own death with some accuracy.
★ Haley's Comet was visible in the sky both on the night that Mark Twain was born and on the night he passed away.
★ Mark Twain published more than 30 books throughout his career.
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★ Ernest Hemingway once said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."
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