Mark Twain

Did you know that Samuel Clemens was born in 1835, a year that Halley's comet, who's orbit takes it by the Earth roughly once every 76 years, was bright in the sky? Did you also know that in 1909, as he neared the end of his life, he imagined both himself and the comet as "unaccountable freaks," who "…came in together. They must go out together."? He died in 1910; the day after the comet's orbit took it closest to the sun.

The term "Mark Twain", a boatman's call noting that the river was only two fathoms deep, the minimum depth for safe navigation, was picked up by Samuel Clemens during his time as a steamboat pilot. Clemens began using the pseudonym in 1861 after he wrote a humorous travel letter signed by "Mark Twain" for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. He continued to use the pseudonym for nearly 50 years.

As a wedding present, Twain's father-in-law surprised the couple with a three-story mansion in Buffalo, NY, complete with coachman, cook, housemaid, as well as a horse and carriage. After viewing the lavish furniture of the mansion, Twain, overcome with emotion, told his father-in-law that he was welcome to stay whenever he was in Buffalo. For free.

When Mark Twain began writing Huckleberry Finn, he wrote to a friend, "I like it only tolerably well . . and may pigeonhole or burn [the manuscript] when done." Ernest Hemingway wrote that "all American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. . . . All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

Huckleberry Finn began stirring up controversy almost as soon as it was published. The Concord Public Library banned the book in 1885, stating that the book was "absolutely immoral in its tone," and "trash of the veriest sort." Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, weighed in with, "If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses, he had best stop writing for them."

Events
Civil War
Gold Rush
Gilded Age (Literature)
Tammany Hall

People
Abraham Lincoln
Teddy Roosevelt
Helen Keller
Ulysses S. Grant
Thomas Nast
Mississippi River