Mark Twain wrote some of the most famous adventure stories in American literature, and his own life was just as adventurous: riverboat pilot, gold-country reporter, world traveller and inventor-enthusiast. Here are the facts worth knowing, all checked.

His real name and his river town

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, in the tiny village of Florida, Missouri. When he was about four, his family moved to Hannibal, a town on the Mississippi River. Hannibal became the model for St. Petersburg, the town where Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn have their adventures.

What “mark twain” means

Before he was a famous writer, Clemens trained as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi and worked the river until the Civil War stopped traffic in 1861. On riverboats, a crew member measured the depth with a weighted line and called out the result. “Mark twain” meant the line showed two fathoms, about 12 feet: deep enough for the boat to pass safely. He began signing his writing with the name in the 1860s.

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Five fun, true facts

  • The comet: Twain was born in 1835, when Halley’s Comet was visible. He predicted he would “go out” with the comet, and he died on April 21, 1910, the year it came back.
  • The typewriter: Twain loved new gadgets. His memoir Life on the Mississippi (1883) is often described as the first book manuscript delivered to a publisher in typewritten form. A typist copied it from his handwriting.
  • The misquote: In 1897 a newspaper reported he was gravely ill. He told a reporter, “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” The popular version, “reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”, is a later misquote.
  • Huck Finn’s fame: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in Britain in 1884 and in the United States in 1885. Ernest Hemingway later wrote that all modern American literature comes from that one book.
  • A jumping frog: his first big success was a short, funny story about a jumping-frog contest in a California mining camp, published in 1865.

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See all his free books on the Mark Twain author page, and more great Americans in American classics.

Sources

Twain’s books reflect the attitudes and language of 19th-century America. Reading them together, and talking about what has changed, is a great way to share them with older children.

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