Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in 1835 in Florida, Missouri, and grew up in the river town of Hannibal on the Mississippi -an environment that would shape his greatest works. He adopted the pen name 'Mark Twain' (a riverboat depth-sounding call meaning two fathoms deep) after working as a steamboat pilot, a profession he loved and was cut short by the Civil War.

Twain's breakthrough came with 'The Innocents Abroad' (1869), a witty account of his travels in Europe and the Holy Land that skewered American provincialism and Old World pretension equally. 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' (1876) and, above all, 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' (1884) cemented his reputation. William Faulkner called Huckleberry Finn 'the source from which all American literature flows.'

Twain was not merely a humorist. His later works grew darker: 'A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court' satirized both medievalism and industrial progress; 'Pudd'nhead Wilson' examined race and identity in antebellum Missouri; and the posthumously published 'The Mysterious Stranger' explored nihilism and the nature of good and evil. He was also a sharp political commentator, an anti-imperialist, and an early opponent of racial discrimination.

Despite earning enormous sums from his writing and lecturing, Twain lost most of his fortune in bad investments, including a typesetting machine that was overtaken by the Linotype. He spent years on grueling lecture tours to pay off his debts after declaring bankruptcy in 1894. He was born and died in years when Halley's Comet was visible -a coincidence he had predicted. He died in 1910, mourned across America.