# The Halleys Comet Lifetime *A Biography of Mark Twain* — Legendary Biographies No. 228 - **Subject:** Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) - **Written by:** Eleanor Whitlock - **Shelf:** Letters & Ideas / Literature - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 193 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **Paperback:** $19.99 — 6 × 9 in · 193 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-153-6) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Theo Brackett (ISBN 979-8-90623-233-5) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/228-the-halleys-comet-lifetime.html ## About this book He was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, the sixth of seven children of an unsuccessful country lawyer named John Marshall Clemens. The family moved to Hannibal, on the Mississippi River, when Sam was four. He apprenticed as a printer at twelve, became a Mississippi steamboat pilot at twenty-three, took the pen name Mark Twain in 1863, published The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County in 1865, The Innocents Abroad in 1869, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, Life on the Mississippi in 1883, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in 1889, and Pudd'nhead Wilson in 1894. He was born two weeks after the appearance of Halley's Comet in 1835. He died on April 21, 1910, the day after the comet's next appearance, at seventy-four. Eleanor Whitlock's biography traces the arc through the long Hannibal childhood, the Mississippi steamboat-pilot years, the Nevada silver-mining year of 1861, the long Daily Territorial Enterprise journalism in Virginia City, the long Innocents Abroad European-and-Holy-Land travel of 1867, the 1870 marriage to Olivia Langdon and the Hartford Nook Farm years, the long Paige typesetter financial catastrophe of 1894 that produced the Following the Equator world lecture tour to pay the creditors, the deaths of Susy (1896) and Olivia (1904) and Jean (1909) that the book treats as the long wound under everything, and the Stormfield (Redding, Connecticut) house where Sam died. What emerges is a portrait of the most consequential American writer of the nineteenth century — and the long Halley's-Comet-bracketed life the country has been reading for the better part of two hundred years. ## Contents 1. Florida and Hannibal 2. Death and the Printer's Apprenticeship 3. The Wandering Printer and the River 4. The Death of Henry 5. The Marion Rangers and the West 6. The Frog and the Sandwich Islands 7. The Quaker City and Olivia 8. Buffalo and the Move to Hartford 9. Tom Sawyer to Huckleberry Finn 10. A Connecticut Yankee and the European Wandering 11. The Around-the-World Tour 12. Vienna, the Repayment, the Anti-Imperialist Years 13. The Autobiography and Albert Bigelow Paine 14. The Death of Jean 15. Letters from the Earth and the Mysterious Stranger 16. Seven Days at Stormfield 17. Paine, Clara, and the First Posthumous Decades 18. Woodlawn and the Coda ## Questions **Who is The Halleys Comet Lifetime about?** Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain). The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Halleys Comet Lifetime — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,932 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 59,500 words, 18 chapters, 193 pages in the paperback. **What is the printed book like?** 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf. ## The writer Eleanor Whitlock is a New York-based biographer who writes about American women of letters and their reckonings with celebrity. Her research focuses on the private spaces and public moments that shape literary history, as seen in her biographies of Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, both of which were shortlisted for national biography prizes. Through titles like Black Holes, The Lake Forest Park Sidewalk, and The Biafra Broadcasts, she examines the intersection of archival history and personal narrative. Her other publications include The Jamaican Renaissance, The Fitzroy Road Kitchen, The Plaza Hotel Party, The Owl Farm, and The Elysee Hotel. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she spends her spare time restoring vintage typewriters and walking in Prospect Park.