Mark Twain

Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri. Raised in Hannibal, on the Mississippi River. His father dies when he's 11. He drops out of school and apprentices to a printer at 12. He later works as a typesetter for his brother's newspaper. He is doing everything except what he'll become famous for.

Becomes a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. It's the best job he'll ever have, he says later. He earns $250 a month. He learns every sandbar, snag, and bend in 1,200 miles of river. The pen name "Mark Twain" comes from a riverboat leadsman's cry: two fathoms deep. Safe water.

Publishes "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" in a New York newspaper. He'd been failing as a silver miner in Nevada. The story makes him famous overnight. He starts giving lectures and discovers he can make a room full of strangers laugh until they hurt. He'll never stop.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is published. Hemingway later says all modern American literature comes from this one book. Twain writes it in Huck's voice, in dialect, about a boy and an escaped slave on a raft. Libraries ban it. They're still banning it. Faulkner calls Twain "the father of American literature."

Files for bankruptcy. He'd invested his fortune in the Paige Compositor, a typesetting machine of incredible complexity and unreliability. He loses everything. He's 58. He goes on a worldwide lecture tour to pay back every creditor in full, even though bankruptcy law doesn't require it. It takes four years.

Dies in Redding, Connecticut, at 74. He'd predicted it. Halley's Comet appeared the year he was born, 1835, and returned in 1910. "I came in with Halley's Comet," he said, "and I expect to go out with it." He died one day after the comet's closest approach.