Mark Twain

Samuel Clemens grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi, and was apprenticed to a printer at twelve. At twenty-three he qualified as a licensed steamboat pilot, the work he loved most and never got over losing when the Civil War closed the river. His pen name is the leadsman's call for two fathoms — safe water.

He failed at silver mining in Nevada, drifted into journalism, and made his name in 1865 with a tall tale about a jumping frog. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn followed in 1884, a book that argued against the moral consensus of its own country by having a boy decide he would rather go to hell than return a friend to slavery.

He was also a compulsive and disastrous investor. The Paige typesetting machine swallowed his fortune and his wife's; he declared bankruptcy at fifty-nine and paid every creditor in full by lecturing his way around the world. The last years were dark ones — his wife and two of his daughters died before him — and the late writing turned savage about the human race he had spent his life amusing. He died in 1910.