Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Mark Twain was said by Ernest Hemingway
to be "the first truly American writer." His hometown of Hannibal,
Missouri supplied him with a great deal of material for his work.
Besides his novels about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, he wrote
many stort stories about life on the Mississippi River, as well as
political and philosophical writings on the state of humanity. The
legend of him "coming in" and "going out" with Halley's Comet is
mostly true -- the comet was visible within approximately two weeks
of both his birth and death.
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