Today in History

November 30, 1835
A Literary Legend
Samuel Langhorne Clemens is born in Florida, Missouri. He will grow up along the Mississippi River in nearby Hannibal and will take his pen name—Mark Twain—from the river term meaning that it is safe to navigate. "Anybody can have ideas," he writes in a letter in 1868, "the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph." Before his death in 1910, he will write 28 books, including Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (published in 1884), —often hailed as "the great American novel"—and numerous short stories.



Today's Feature History Article

Keeping Up with Mark Twain

Berkeley researchers toil to stay abreast of Samuel Clemens' enormous literary output, which appears to continue unabated




 



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