Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist and essayist praised as the greatest humorist the United States has produced, with William Faulkner calling him the father of American literature. His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), often called the Great American Novel, as well as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). Raised in Hannibal, Missouri, he worked as a printer, a Mississippi riverboat pilot and a journalist before achieving fame with the 1865 story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County; he died in 1910, the day after Halley's Comet, which had also appeared at his birth, made its closest approach to the sun.