Samuel Langhorne Clemens,
better known to most people by his pen name, Mark Twain, was born on November
30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri, the sixth of seven children. At the age of four,
Clemens and his family moved to the small frontier town of Hannibal, Missouri,
on the banks of the Mississippi. According to documentarian Ken Burns, Twain “. . .
rose from a hardscrabble boyhood in the backwoods of Missouri to become . . .
America’s best-known and best-loved
author.” Samuel L. Clemens a/k/a Mark Twain
In his nearly
seventy-five years, Clemens was a man of many titles and occupations,
including: printer’s apprentice, newspaper reporter, riverboat pilot, Confederate
soldier (for two weeks), silver prospector, travel commentator, essayist,
editor, publisher, and lecturer. His most well-known occupation was as an
author. He wrote several books and novels, including:
Innocents Abroad (1869)
Roughing It (1872)
The Gilded Age (1873)
The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer (1876)
The Prince and the
Pauper (1881)
Life on the
Mississippi (1883)
Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (1884)
A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)
Following the
Equator
(1897)
Lapham’s Quarterly
summed up Twain’s life thusly:
Mark
Twain was born on November 30, 1835—two weeks after the perihelion of
Halley’s Comet. “I came in with Halley’s Comet,” Mark Twain commented in 1909.
“It is coming again next year. The Almighty has said, no doubt, ‘Now there are
these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out
together.’” He died on April 21, 1910—one day after the comet had once again
reached its perihelion.
(See, Mark
Twain again follows Halley’s Comet. | Lapham’s Quarterly.)
Find a more detailed discussion of Twain’s life and legacy, see Biography - Mark Twain House. and Mark Twain - Ken Burns.
So, on November 30th,
raise a glass to Samuel Clemens and his writing alter ego, Mark Twain. As
writers and readers, we owe much to him. For, as Ernest Hemingway is reported
to have said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain
called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There was nothing
before. There has been nothing as good since.”