FACTS ABOUT MARK TWAIN

1. He was born two-months premature on November 30, 1835 as Samuel Langhorne Clemens. His home town was Florida, Missouri.  His father was a self-educated lawyer who ran a general store.  At age 4, the family moved to Hannibal, Mo.  His father died when Samuel was 11 of pneumonia.  He was forced to go to work.
2. His first job was as a printer. He moved around including to New York City and Philadelphia.
3. At age 22, he started his career on steamboats and became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River. He got a job for his brother, but a boiler explosion killed him.  He head to find other work when the Civil War shut down the steamboat business.
4. When the Civil War broke out, he joined a Confederate militia unit. After two weeks of training, the unit disbanded because a Union force led by Ulysses S. Grant approached.  Later, Twain was instrumental in publishing Grant’s memoirs which saved Grant financially and made a lot of money for Twain, too.
5. Clemens moved to Nevada to mine for silver. He failed, so he got a job as a reporter for a newspaper.  This was the first time he wrote anything.  He took the pen name Mark Twain based on the riverboat slang for two fathoms (twelve feet) which indicated a safe depth of water.  Before this he had used other pen names like W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab and Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass.
6. He moved on to California to escape a duel. He bounced around.  One day in a saloon, he heard the story of a frog-jumping contest.  Later, he wrote it up as “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”.  It was published on Nov. 18, 1865 and got national attention.  He retitled it as “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”
7. His most successful book was his first – “The Innocents Abroad”.  It was based on letters he sent to newspapers from a trip Europe, Egypt and the Holy Land.  It was a big hit partly because of a rave review from an anonymous critic –  Twain himself.
8. He published “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” in 1876. It introduced Huckleberry Finn who was based on a poor, uneducated boy with a good heart that he knew growing up in Hannibal. “Huckleberry Finn” was published in 1885 and within a month was banned by a library for bad language and indecency.  Nobody had a problem with its racism until the 20^th Century.
9. He had trouble financially. He once lost $200,000 investing in an automatic typesetting machine.  He turned down a chance to invest in Bell’s telephone.  He was an inventor himself.  He had patents for a self-pasting scrapbook and an elastic strap for pants.  He invented a game called Memory Builder based on knowledge of British monarchs.  It was not a success.
10. Twain went bankrupt and moved to Europe because it was cheaper to live there. He had to go on a world speaking tour to get back to solvency.
11. Edison filmed him in 1909. Twain was close friends with Nicola Tesla.
12. He loved cats and owned 19 at one time. Some of his cat’s names were Beelzebub, Blatherskite, Zoroaster, Soapy Sal, Pestilence, and Satan.
13. He was born in a year where Haley’s Comet appeared. Later, he predicted he would die the year the comet returned.  He died on April 21, 1910, the day after the comet appeared.

https://www.history.com/news/8-things-you-may-not-know-about-mark-twain

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/565150/mark-twain-books-facts

https://www.factinate.com/people/27-little-known-facts-mark-twain/