Samuel Langhorne Clemens

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who wrote as Mark Twain, died at Stormfield, his house in Redding, Connecticut, on April 21, 1910. He was seventy-four. Halley's Comet, which had been in the sky at his birth, was back; he had said he would go out with it, and he did, of heart failure, in a bed that faced the windows. Born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, and raised in Hannibal on the Mississippi, he was a printer's apprentice, a river pilot, a western reporter, and then the novelist who put the river into American English. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn made Hannibal a literary map that the town still walks for visitors. The later books — the bitter essays, the travel, the grief after Susy and Livy — belong to the same man. He went bankrupt on a typesetting machine and paid the debts by lecturing around the world in a white suit that became a trademark and a disguise. He kept a careful public face and a private fury at cruelty, empire, and the easy lie. This memorial names Hannibal, the town that formed him. He died in Connecticut. He is buried in Elmira, New York, with the family he outlived, on a hill above the Chemung. The pen name was a river call. The grave is inland. He outlived the river he had piloted. The white suit was a late costume; the earlier man wore a printer's apron and a pilot's memory for snags. Stormfield burned after his death. Hannibal, which he had both mocked and needed, kept the boy and sold tickets. Elmira kept the family. The sentences kept the river.