30 November: Mark Twain

This date in 1835 saw the birth of Mark Twain, US writer. Here are 10 things you might not know about him.

1. His premature birth and his death both coincided with appearances of Halley's Comet. He predicted his own death, commenting the year before the comet's appearance that he had been born to it and would leave with it.
2. Because he was born prematurely, his mother didn't think he would survive childhood. He was a weak child until he was seven. Even after that things didn't look good - he loved to play in water even though he didn’t know how to swim, and consequently nearly drowned nine times before he reached the age of 13.
3. His real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. The pen name Mark Twain comes from a nautical term meaning 'two fathoms deep'. Mark Twain wasn't the only pen name he used – he also wrote under Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab, Sergeant Fathom, and Rambler.
4. He is most famous for Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but neither of those was his best seller during his lifetime. That was Innocents Abroad, Twain’s first book. Not all his writing was wholesome stuff suitable for children. He once wrote a pornographic story set in Elizabethan times. It was written as an excerpt from a diary written by Queen Elizabeth I’s cup-bearer.
5. He was also an inventor and there are three inventions patented by him. One was a self-pasting scrapbook, a kind of forerunner of post it notes; another was a memory game to help people remember history, which didn't do well, and an improved design for trouser braces, which would evolve into the modern Bra-strap.
6. He was a supporter of civil rights and against vivisection. He was also a keen investor in new technology. The latter didn't always go well. He invested in the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter designed to replace human typesetters with a mechanical arm. The machine failed because it was complex and broke down a lot. It cost Twain around $300,000 ($8,200,000 in today's money). This, and the failure of his publishing house, Charles L. Webster and Company, bankrupted him. He embarked on a lecture tour in order to recover financially, and even though he wasn't legally required to, paid back all his creditors in full.
7. His lecture tours were akin to today's performances by stand-up comedians, which may have been why he was able to claw himself back from bankruptcy by embarking on them. His lectures were on subjects like ‘The First Watermelon I Ever Stole’. He wasn't afraid to talk about controversial topics, either. Another of his lectures was called ‘Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism’, which was basically about masturbation.
8. He was a good friend of the scientist, Nikola Tesla. Twain allowed Tesla to pass an electric current through him. This caused Twain to sh*t himself, but far from being annoyed, Twain believed the Electricity had cured him of chronic constipation.
9. Twain is said to have been the first novelist to write a book on a Typewriter.
10. As well as predicting his own death, Twain had a predictive dream about the demise of his brother, Henry. In the dream, Henry lay in a metal coffin with a bouquet of white flowers on his chest, with a red rose in the middle. After Henry died in a boiler explosion on the boat he was working on, Twain went to view the body and it was exactly as it had been in the dream. Twain was stricken with guilt, believing he was responsible for his brother's death in some way.

More details about my books. Follow this link if you like Superheroes, Psychics and/or quirky short stories. 

I've listed the themes each novel touches on here for easy reference.

Like my author page on Facebook for news on new books and blog posts.

Follow me on Twitter and Pinterest