The Halleys Comet Lifetime

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.