Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in the tiny village of Florida, Missouri, in 1835, a couple of weeks after Halley’s Comet made its closest approach to the sun. When he was four, the family moved to Hannibal, a town on the Mississippi River, and the river and the town became the world of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

His father died when he was eleven, and he left school to work as a printer’s apprentice. He set type in towns across the country, and then, in his twenties, he fulfilled a boyhood dream and trained as a Mississippi steamboat pilot. He was licensed in 1859 and loved the work, until the Civil War closed the river. His later pen name came from the river: “mark twain” was the leadsman’s call meaning the water was two fathoms, twelve feet, deep, just enough for the boat.

He went west to Nevada and California, where he failed at silver mining and succeeded at newspaper humor. His story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865) made him known across the country. A comic book about a tour of Europe and the Holy Land, The Innocents Abroad (1869), made him rich. He married Olivia Langdon, settled in Hartford, Connecticut, and spent summers at a farm near Elmira, New York, writing in a little eight-sided study on a hill.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is told by Huck himself, a runaway boy who floats down the Mississippi on a raft with Jim, a man escaping slavery. In Huck’s voice, the voice of a real American boy of the river towns, Twain found something new for American literature. Ernest Hemingway later wrote that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” The book has also been banned, argued over and defended ever since, for its language and its portrayal of race.

Twain lost his fortune in a failed typesetting machine and paid off every debt with a lecture tour around the world. In his last years he lost his wife and two daughters. In 1909 he said he had come in with Halley’s Comet and expected to go out with it. He died on April 21, 1910, the day after the comet’s return brought it closest to the sun.