Mark Twain
1835 – 1910 · United States
Known for: The father of American literature
“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”
Biography
Born as Halley's Comet blazed overhead, Samuel Clemens took his pen name from the riverboat cry for safe water, "mark twain", and became the voice of America itself. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which Hemingway called the source of all modern American writing, put the vernacular of ordinary people onto the page for the first time and turned a boyhood on the Mississippi into literature.
He was a humorist, a lecturer, a fierce critic of racism and imperialism, and a bankrupt who paid back every creditor on a world speaking tour. He predicted he would "go out with" Halley's Comet as he had come in with it, and in 1910, as the comet returned, he did.