
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He is most noted for his novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called “the Great American Novel.”
Samuel Clemens was born shortly after the appearance of Halley’s Comet in 1835. He believed that he would “go out with it” as well. Halley’s Comet appears about once every 75 years, and Samuel died the day after its return in 1910.
The pen name Mark Twain comes from a riverboat term measuring the water’s depth. A ‘mark’ stood for a fathom or six feet, while ‘twain’ meant two. If a man called out ‘Mark Twain,’ it meant the water was 12 feet deep and safe for riverboats of the time.
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