Mark Twain

John Marshall Clemens died of pneumonia in 1847, and his son left school the following year for a printing office. Type is a hard school and a good one. Setting other men's sentences by hand, letter by letter, teaches a boy exactly how far a sentence can run before it falls over. He worked his brother Orion's Hannibal Journal, then set type in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Cincinnati. In June 1858 the steamboat Pennsylvania blew four boilers below Memphis. His younger brother Henry, whom he had brought onto the river, died of the injuries eight days later. He held himself responsible for it for the rest of his life.

The Innocents Abroad in 1869 outsold everything else he published in his lifetime and turned travel writing into a saleable genre. Roughing It followed, then Tom Sawyer in 1876, Life on the Mississippi in 1883, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in 1889 and the strange, bitter Pudd'nhead Wilson. He also patented a self-pasting scrapbook that earned more than most of the novels. The books and the moral reckoning inside them are BriefHistory's ground. This page follows the money and the funerals.

He poured roughly 300,000 dollars into James Paige's typesetting machine between 1880 and 1894, an intricate thing that broke whenever anyone touched it, and it broke him too. His publishing house failed in April 1894. He owed creditors money he was not legally required to repay, and he repaid it anyway, going around the world on a lecture tour that began in July 1895. While he was abroad his daughter Susy died of spinal meningitis at 24, in the emptied Hartford house. Olivia died in 1904. Jean died on Christmas Eve 1909. He outlived his wife and three of his four children.

He had said he came in with Halley's Comet in 1835 and expected to go out with it. The comet reached perihelion on April 20, 1910, and he died of a heart attack the next day at Stormfield in Redding, Connecticut. The timing has done more for the myth than several of the books, and the myth turned out to be the problem. For 50 years he was shelved as a boys' author in a white suit, while critics from Van Wyck Brooks onward fought over whether the country had tamed him. The Hartford house was nearly lost, then saved. The Kennedy Center began giving a prize in his name in 1998.

Mark Twain's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County article
  The sketch that carried his name across the country 1865
• The Innocents Abroad book
  His best-selling book during his own lifetime 1869
• Self-pasting scrapbook patent
  By a wide margin his most profitable invention 1873
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer book 1876
• Charles L. Webster and Company company
  His publishing house — it printed Grant's memoirs, then went bankrupt 1884
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn book
  Published in the United States in February 1885 and banned within weeks 1885

• 1847 aged ~12 His father dies of pneumonia and the household income ends
• June 13, 1858 aged 22 The steamboat Pennsylvania explodes below Memphis His younger brother Henry died of the injuries eight days later.
• February 3, 1863 aged 27 Signs a newspaper piece Mark Twain for the first time He was writing for the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada.
• 1870 aged ~35 Marries Olivia Langdon in Elmira, New York
• February 18, 1885 aged 49 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is published in the United States The Concord public library threw it out the following month.
• April 1894 aged 58 His publishing house fails and he files for bankruptcy The Paige typesetter had absorbed roughly 300,000 dollars.
• July 1895 aged 59 Sets out on a world lecture tour to repay debts he did not legally owe
• 1896 aged ~61 Susy Clemens dies of spinal meningitis at 24 Her father was in England and did not reach her.
• April 21, 1910 aged 74 Dies of a heart attack at Stormfield in Redding, Connecticut Halley's Comet had reached perihelion the day before.

• Ulysses S. Grant 1822–1885
  18th President and Union Army general whose leadership was decisive in winning the Civil War. published his memoirs
• Nikola Tesla 1856–1943
  Serbian-American inventor who developed alternating current electrical systems and numerous electrical innovations. friend
• Thomas Edison 1847–1931
  Inventor and scientist whose research laboratory model and electrical innovations transformed modern life. filmed him in 1909
• Helen Keller 1880–1968
  Deafblind author and lecturer who became the leading American advocate for blind and disabled people. found a patron for her education
• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. opposed
• Ernest Hemingway 1899–1961
  Nobel Prize-winning novelist whose spare prose style defined 20th-century American fiction. named him the source of American literature