10 historical facts about Mark Twain

1. Mark Twain was born under the name Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835 in the town of Florida, Missouri.
2. In 1839, when Twain was four years old, his parents moved the family to Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain would grow up.
3. In 1884, Twain helped form a company called Charles L. Webster and Company, which went bankrupt in 1894. The company had been a printing office, but had also tried to sell an automatic typesetting machine known as the Paige Compositor.
4. Twain was born in the year of Halley's Comet and died in the year of Halley's Comet. His death was by heart attack in Redding, Connecticut, on April 21, 1919.
5. Twain got his first job in 1847 as an apprentice printer working at the Missouri Courier newspaper.
6. In 1859, he received his license as a steamboat pilot. It had taken him two years of study and he had to memorize 2,000 miles of land and water along the Mississippi River.
7. He first used his famous pen name of "Mark Twain" on February 3, 1863, under an article for the Territorial Enterprise newspaper in Nevada.
8. In 1907, Oxford University awarded Twain an honorary doctorate degree, making Twain a Doctor of Letters.
9. Though remembered today mostly as a humorist novelist, Twain's early literary works were mostly travel pieces (though often enough filled with humor) and his later works are usually darker pieces of literature.
10. Twain was a popular public speaker during his lifetime, and spoke at hundreds of rallies, clubs, events and other gatherings.