Trivia
- Twain was born and died when Halley’s Comet was visible in the sky. He was aware that he was born under Halley’s Comet and occasionally predicted that he would “go out with the comet.” When Twain died many of his obituaries noted this coincidence.
- Twain was the first person to ever type a manuscript (Life on the Mississippi) on a typewriter and submit it to a publisher. When Remington found out that Twain was using one of their machines, they were quick to use his remarks about the typewriter in their advertisements.
- Twain favored selling his books through subscription houses rather than publishing houses. Instead of selling books in retail stores, subscription houses used agents to sell books door-to-door. Twain found huge success in selling his first travel book, Innocents Abroad, by subscription, and he considered subscription publishing to be the only sensible way to market his books.
- Twain wore not only his white suit, but also his red doctoral cap and gown to his daughter Clara’s wedding.
- Twain was one of the first people to own a telephone in his home. Twain created a chart in order to keep track of his household’s misbehaving telephone, with remarks like “Artillery can be heard” and “Thunder can be heard.”
- Mark Twain patented and copyrighted himself in order to prevent unauthorized persons from using his name as a trademark. It was a protective measure, but in order for the patent rights to be issued, Twain had to go into a very private cigar and whiskey business.
- Twain was a good friend of Helen Keller, and he hosted a party to promote her book The World I Live In.
- Twain made a few significant attempts at mining from 1861 to 1865. Having missed out on California’s gold rush, he worked on quartz-mining for silver, surface-mining for gold, and pocket-mining. He wasn’t financially successful, but Twain parlayed his mining experiences into the slightly fabricated stories in Roughing It.
- Mark Twain first appeared on an American postage stamp in February 1940, when he was depicted on the 10-cent denomination of the “Famous Americans” series’ “Authors” set.
- Twain had a strong fascination with Adam and Eve, the Bible’s first man and woman, whose story is told in Genesis. He referenced the couple hundreds of times in his writings and speeches, as well as in several stories and sketches. The collective term for these writings is “Adamic Diaries”
- After his publishing firm, Charles L. Webster & Company, entered into voluntary bankruptcy in 1894 and he lost a fortune in the paige compositor (an automatic typesetting machine), Twain undertook his most ambitious lecture tour in 1895-96. He was able to pay off all of his firm’s debts by 1898.
- Twain’s favorite game was billiards, and he had a special room in both his Hartford and Redding, CT houses built for the game. Twain had a habit of playing marathon sessions with his friends and staying up all night long at the billiards table.
- Twain was born on a Monday and he was two months premature. He was named after his grandfather, Samuel B. Clemens, and a Virginia friend of his father named Langhorne.
- Bermuda was the first and last foreign land that Twain visited during his lifetime. He actually planned on staying there in definitely in January 1910, but he returned home exactly a week before he died.
- In 1893 Twain went to Chicago to attend the World’s Fair, but he got so sick that he had to stay in his hotel room and he missed the entire fair.
- Harriet Beecher Stowe was Mark Twain’s neighbor in Connecticut.
- Clara Clemens was the only child of Mark Twain’s to survive him. She was her father’s sole heir, managed his estate after his death and controlled her father’s posthumous image until her own death.
- Twain had only one son, Langdon Clemens, and he was born premature just like Twain. He was their first child, born nine months and five days after Twain and Livy were married, but he died in June of 1872, at only a year and a half old.
- Ever since they were engaged, Livy Clemens helped edit Twain’s books.
- He occasionally travelled using the name “Samuel Langhorne” to avoid recognition.
- Twain died at Stormfield on Thursday afternoon, April 21, 1910. His body was dressed in a white suit and carried to New York City the next day. There was a funeral procession and service in New York City, and another at the Langdon family home in Elmira.
- The only known moving picture ever taken of Mark Twain is Thomas Edison’s short adaptation of The Prince and the Pauper, which includes footage of Mark Twain at Stormfield.
- The famous fence whitewashing episode from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is reenacted every year in a fence-painting competition in Hannibal, MO, where a fence was erected next to Mark Twain’s boyhood home.
- Twain was the first writer to use fingerprinting as a plot device in a novel. (Pudd’nhead Wilson, 1894)
- Benjamin Franklin was one of Twain’s icons, and references to him often appear in Twain’s writing.
- Twain’s only grandchild and last direct descendant, Nina Clemens Gabrilowitsch, died in 1966.
- Twain was very interested in the German language and of all the languages that he attempted to learn, German was the one he came closest to mastering. German is peppered throughout his writings and speeches, and he wrote an essay titled “Beauties of the German Language” in 1898.
- Twain was a close friend of Ulysses S. Grant, and he published Grant’s Civil War memoirs soon after Grant’s death. The initial sales of Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant allowed Twain to present Grant’s widow with a royalty check for $200,000; it was the largest single royalty payment ever made up to that time.
- Hal Holbrook won an Emmy and a Tony Award for his performances as a 70-year-old Mark Twain.
