Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, and raised in Hannibal, which inspired settings for his famous novels. Early in life, he worked as a printer's apprentice and typesetter before training as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, adopting the pen name 'Mark Twain'—a river term meaning two fathoms deep—from his time there. A tragic boiler explosion on the steamboat Pennsylvania in 1858 killed his younger brother Henry, an event that haunted Twain and sparked his interest in parapsychology. In 1861, Twain moved to Nevada with his brother Orion, working as a journalist and mining prospector, experiences detailed in his book Roughing It (1872). He gained fame with the short story 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' (1865) and married Olivia 'Livy' Langdon in 1870, settling in Hartford, Connecticut, for 17 years where he wrote many classics. During this period (1874–1891), he produced The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), often summering at Quarry Farm in Elmira, New York. Financial troubles from bad investments, including a typesetting machine, led to bankruptcy in the 1890s, prompting a global lecture tour to recover. Twain's later years were shadowed by profound losses: daughter Susy died of spinal meningitis in 1896 at age 24, wife Livy in 1904 after 34 years of marriage, and daughter Jean in 1909, just months before his own death from a heart attack on April 21, 1910. The family is buried in Elmira's Woodlawn Cemetery. He dictated his unconventional autobiography starting in 1870, with the complete version published posthumously in 2010 due to his embargo wishes. Despite business failures, Twain published Ulysses S. Grant's bestselling memoirs in 1885 through his firm, aiding his recovery.