Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, in 1835 and grew up in Hannibal, on the Mississippi. He apprenticed as a printer, became a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi (the cry mark twain — two fathoms, safe water — became his pen name), and after the river closed during the Civil War made his way west as a journalist, then around the world as a lecturer. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) used the speech of a runaway boy and an escaped slave to give American literature its first true vernacular voice; Hemingway later said that 'all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain.' He was the most photographed American of his time and one of the wittiest; he died on April 21, 1910, the day after Halley's Comet — which had appeared the year of his birth — returned to its perihelion, exactly as he had predicted.
All Figures
Novelist · Humourist · The Father of American Literature
Mark Twain
1,835 CE – 1,910 CE
The Missouri riverboat pilot whose Adventures of Huckleberry Finn taught American prose to speak in its own voice — colloquial, sceptical, comic, and morally serious.
Lifetime
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