Facts About Mark Twain:
- Mark Twain's real name is Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
- Haley's Comet was visible in the sky on the night Mark Twain was born. He predicted that he would die when it returned 75 years later. Clemens died on April 21, 1910, the day after the comet's orbit came closest to the Earth.
- Clemens encouraged his younger brother, Henry, to get a job as a steamboat pilot as well. Henry was killed when the boiler on board his boat exploded. Clemens claimed to have seen his brother's death in a dream before it happened, sparking an interest in parapsychology.
- To pay off debts accumulated as a result of failed business ventures, Twain toured the world as a lecturer, publishing his experiences in Following the Equator (1897).
- The term “mark twain” means it is safe to sail because the water’s depth is two fathoms, or 12 feet. “Mark one” is six feet, “mark ta-ree” is 18 feet, and “mark four” is 24 feet.
- “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.”
- The book, first published in 1884 and described by Ernest Hemingway as the basis of "all modern American literature", has been disappearing from US school curricula due to its 217 mentions of the racist term.
- So, Mark Twain stays in the news even 100 years after his death. First, with the initial volume of his Autobiography, finally published in the form planned by the author. Second, with the controversy stirred up by a "new" edition of Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in which the offensive racial epithets "injun" and "nigger" are replaced by "Indian" and "slave" respectively.
- “Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.”
― Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson
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