Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, apprenticed as a printer, then piloted riverboats on the Mississippi before drifting west to Nevada, where failed mining sent him into journalism. A humorous story about a jumping frog, published in 1865, brought him international attention under the name Mark Twain. He followed with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876 and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884, along with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and The Gilded Age, cowritten with Charles Dudley Warner. His lecture circuit made him wealthy, but he lost most of it to bad ventures like the Paige Compositor and filed for bankruptcy before clawing back to solvency and repaying every creditor in full. He was born two weeks after Halley's Comet appeared in 1835, predicted he would die with its return, and suffered a heart attack on April 21, 1910, the day after the comet reached perihelion.