On November 30, 1835, a baby boy named Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in the tiny town of Florida, Missouri. Halley's Comet was streaking across the sky that very night, and Samuel later joked that he had arrived with the comet and would leave with it too. His family soon moved to Hannibal, a steamboat town on the muddy Mississippi River, where Samuel grew up exploring caves, rafting on the river, and getting into trouble with his friends.
When he grew up, Samuel worked as a steamboat pilot, and that is where he found his famous pen name. Riverboat crews used to shout "mark twain!" when measuring water depth - it meant the river was two fathoms deep, just safe enough to sail. Samuel borrowed the phrase and signed his stories Mark Twain. He poured his Hannibal boyhood into books like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, filling them with whitewashed fences, treasure caves, and runaway rafts.
Twain became the most famous author in America, traveling the world and making audiences howl with laughter from London to Australia. And get this - Halley's Comet returned in April 1910, and Samuel Clemens died the very next day, exactly as he had predicted. More than a hundred years later, kids still grin at Tom and Huck's adventures, proof that a Missouri riverboat kid grew up to become the storyteller of America.
