"All modern American literature comes from one book by Twain called Huckleberry Finn," Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1935.
When Mark Twain died in April 1910, he was one of the most famous Americans in the world. His stories evoked the raw, vivid lives of common Americans. He created captivating characters and used humor, irreverence, and satire to both entertain and to convey truth. Twain befriended Ulysses S. Grant in the years following his presidency and in 1885 published his memoirs to wide acclaim.
Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, he grew up in Hannibal, MO, a bustling river town with steamboats arriving daily, circuses, minstrel shows, and revivalists who stoked the imagination of a wide-eyed little boy. Hannibal also had a darker, more violent aspect, and Clemens witnessed that as well. All of these elements found their way into his stories. When he was twenty-one, he secured a job piloting a steamboat on the Mississippi. He drew his pen name, Mark Twain, from this experience.
When the Civil War began, most civilian traffic on the river halted. Twain joined the Confederate Army in June 1861, but his volunteer unit soon disbanded, and he headed out west. He began writing for the newspapers and got his first big break in 1865 with his story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” A great many novels and short stories followed, cementing Twain’s place in the pantheon of American literature.
In an interesting irony, Twain was born shortly after the appearance of Halley’s Comet, and he predicted he would “go out with it.” He died on April 21, one day after the comet made its closest approach to earth.
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