Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author, humourist and poet. He is famous for legendary tales he has written such as ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ and its sequel ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’.
Mark Twain was born on the 30th of November 1835 and grew up in Hannibal Missouri, which was also the setting for Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Mark was the 6th of 7 children but only 3 survived childhood. His father also died at a young age, when Mark was 11 his father passed away due to pneumonia. When he was 12 he became a printers apprentice and in 1851 he became a typesetter, contributor of articles and drawing humorous sketches for the Hannibal Journal. When he was 18 he left Hannibal to go and work as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St Louis and Cincinnati and joined the newly formed printers union known as the International Typographical Union. Mark Twain was inspired to become a pilot after a riding a steam boat to New Orleans down the Mississippi. He studied 2,000 miles of the Mississippi for 2 years before he received his steam boat license. In 1870 Mark Twain and Olivia Langdon were married and moved to Buffalo New York where their first child Langdon died of diphtheria at 19 months of age. They also had three daughters named Susy, Clara and Jean. In 1875 he wrote his first major success ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ and in 1885 he wrote the sequel ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’. In 1904 Olivia Langdon passed away after 34 years of marriage.
Towards the later years of Twain’s life he fell into a deep depression that started with his daughter Susy’s death in 1896 and got more serious when his daughter Jean, passed away in 1909. His close friend a Henry Rogers also died suddenly in 1909. Twain was quoted saying ‘I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’ This proved to be accurate as Mark Twain died of a heart attack on the 21st of April 1910, one day after Halleys Commet’s closest approach to Earth.