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Clemens
Born on November 30, 1835, a few nights after Halley's CometA visible comet that appears about every 75 years. flashed through the sky, Samuel Langhorne Clemens grew up along the Mississippi River. He quit school after his father's death so that he could earn money for his family. In addition to writing under the pen name Mark Twain, he was a riverboat pilot, a journalist, and a lecturer.
Twain grew up in a town that the Mississippi River ran through. He was a steamboat pilot for a while. When Twain left the river lift, he didn't come back to live there, but he did return to the town through his writings. Read "The Mighty Mississippi."
Twain served in the Confederate Army for only a few weeks. Afterward, he boarded a train and headed out West in search of a new job. He stated, "When the war broke out..., I had been a pilot a couple of years or more, and was receiving so sumptuous a wage that I regarded myself as a rich man. I was without occupation now; the river was closed to navigation... My elder brother was appointed Secretary of the new Territory of Nevada, and as I had to pay his passage across the continent I went along with him to see if I could find something to do out there on the frontier."
Twain liked to write about what he knew, so he wrote
- travel books,
- historical novels,
- short stories,
- and fictional novels.
Read "Mark Twain's Comic Voice" to find out more about how Twain began writing.
Ironically, Twain died on April 21, 1910, the night after Halley's Comet was visible. He had said, "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.'"
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