8 Things You May Not Know About Mark Twain

Ernest Hemingway once declared "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn.'… It's the best book we've had.” First published (in the United Kingdom) in December 1884, the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” is considered by many to be one of the great American novels, and was Twain’s masterpiece. Check out eight fascinating facts about the world-famous author, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

1. As a baby, he wasn’t expected to live.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born two months prematurely on November 30, 1835, in tiny Florida, Missouri, and remained sickly and frail until he was 7 years old. Clemens was the sixth of seven children, only three of whom survived to adulthood. In 1839, Clemens’ father, John Marshall, a self-educated lawyer who ran a general store, moved his family to the town of Hannibal, Missouri, in search of better business opportunities. (Decades later, his son would set his popular novels “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in a fictionalized version of Hannibal.) John Marshall Clemens became a justice of the peace in Hannibal but struggled financially. When Samuel Clemens was 11, his 49-year-old father died of pneumonia.

2. Twain’s formal education was limited.

In 1848, the year after his father’s death, Clemens went to work full-time as an apprentice printer at a newspaper in Hannibal. In 1851, he moved over to a typesetting job at a local paper owned by his older brother, Orion, and eventually penned a handful of short, satirical items for the publication. In 1853, 17-year-old Clemens left Hannibal and spent the next several years living in places such as New York City, Philadelphia and Keokuk, Iowa, and working as a printer. Read the full article at History.Com