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.

In 1857, Clemens became an apprentice steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River. The following year, while employed on a boat called the Pennsylvania, he got his younger brother, Henry, a job aboard the vessel. Samuel Clemens worked on the Pennsylvania until early June. Then, on June 13, disaster struck when the Pennsylvania, traveling near Memphis, experienced a deadly boiler explosion; among those who perished as a result was 19-year-old Henry. Samuel Clemens was devastated by the incident but got his pilot’s license in He worked on steamboats until the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, when commercial traffic along the Mississippi was halted. Clemens’ pen name, Mark Twain, comes from a term signifying two fathoms (12 feet), a safe depth of water for steamboats.

After becoming a successful writer, Twain sunk money into a number of bad investments and eventually went bankrupt. One investing debacle, involving an automatic typesetting machine, cost him nearly $200,000 by some estimates, an enormous sum considering that in 1890 the majority of American families earned less than $1,200 per year. Conversely, when offered the chance to invest in a new invention, the telephone, Twain reportedly turned down its creator, Alexander Graham Bell. Twain himself invented a variety of products, including a self-pasting scrapbook, which sold well, and an elastic strap for pants, which didn’t.

Quotes: "A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read." "Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often." "Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter." "'Classic.' A book which people praise and don't read." "Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times." "Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry." "My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water." "When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old." "Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been."