The gilded age

Samuel Clemens (1835–1910) grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, and worked as a printer's apprentice, a steamboat pilot, a silver prospector in Nevada and a newspaper reporter before he became Mark Twain. A comic story about a jumping frog made his name in 1865, and his lectures and travel books made him the most famous American writer of his time.

He drew on his boyhood for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and on his piloting years for Life on the Mississippi. Late in life he lost his fortune in bad investments and paid his debts with a lecture tour around the world. He was born in a year of Halley's Comet and died when it returned.