Mark Twain

I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835 and with the Mississippi at my doorstep. In Hannibal I learned the printer’s case before I learned grammar, setting other men’s sentences at my brother’s paper. The river tutored me better than school: its shoals, its fogs, its traffic of cotton, lies, and news.

By 1859 I held a pilot’s license and a headful of channel marks. The cry "mark twain"—safe water, two fathoms—suited me, so I stole it for a name. War closed the river. I served a brief, inglorious hitch in a Confederate militia, then lit out with my brother for the Nevada Territory. I failed at mining, found my hand in journalism at the Territorial Enterprise, and sent a frog leaping into notoriety clear across the country.

The lecture circuit kept bread on the table; The Innocents Abroad kept it buttered. I married Olivia Langdon, made a home in Hartford, and raised daughters under the same roof where Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Life on the Mississippi took shape. I trusted the American tongue more than Latin, and let boys and raftmen tell the truth that polite company muffles.

Success made me brave, and bravery made me foolish. My firm printed Grant’s Memoirs to prosperity, then I sank a fortune in a mechanical typesetter and went under. I paid my creditors the long way—around the world with a trunk and a voice. In old age I came to detest empire and cant, wrote against our conquest of the Philippines, and waited for the comet. It returned in 1910; I kept the appointment.