Samuel Langhorne Clemens grew up on the Mississippi River’s banks and spent his adolescence and early adulthood working on riverboats, where he wrote several of his novels. Even his pen name, Mark Twain, was derived from a riverside phrase that refers to a river depth of two fathoms or deeper. He even chose the Mississippi River as the setting for his most renowned literary masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Twain was a writer, essayist, lecturer, and humorist who was renowned for works such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Authors’ Court, and The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. He was also a comedian and speaker. Mark Twain was born in 1835, only a few months after the arrival of Halley’s Comet, and he was fond of joking that he had come in with the comet and would go with it as well. He passed away in 1910, the day after the comet made its appearance.
