The great writer Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who went by the pen name Mark Twain

Mark Twain: The Voice of the American River
Discovered at Woodlawn Cemetery, Elmira, New York

On my walk through Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, New York, with my two well-worn novels in hand, I came upon the grave of Mark Twain — born Samuel Langhorne Clemens — often hailed as the “greatest humorist the United States has produced.”

Twain’s story begins in Missouri, where he was born in 1835, the son of a lawyer, and raised along the banks of the Mississippi River. As a boy, he couldn’t have known that the muddy waterway outside his door would one day flow through the heart of American literature.

After stints as a riverboat pilot, a failed silver and gold prospector, and eventually a newspaper reporter in Nevada, Samuel adopted the pen name “Mark Twain” — a nautical term used by steamboatmen to indicate that the water was two fathoms deep (12 feet) and safe for navigation.

His pen would guide readers far more deeply.

By the 1870s, Twain had settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where he wrote some of his most celebrated works, including:

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) — widely regarded as one of the greatest American novels ever written.

Twain had a remarkable relationship with Elmira, his wife Olivia Langdon’s hometown. Many of his most important works were written during summers spent at the Langdon family’s Quarry Farm, overlooking the Chemung River.

In his later years, Twain reflected on his celestial timing. Born shortly after Halley’s Comet appeared in 1835, he predicted in 1909:

“I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet.”

His prediction proved eerily accurate. Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, just one day after the comet’s closest approach to Earth.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens died in Redding, Connecticut on April 21, 1910. He was 74.

1835-1910

Resting beside Mark Twain’s grave is his wife, Olivia. The family moved to a villa in Florence, Italy due to Olivia’s poor health. On June 5, 1904, she died in Florence from heart failure.

*all images owned by Phil Crawford other than stock photo of Mark Twain.