Mark Twain

Image Source: thefamouspeople.com

"A full belly is little worth where the mind is starved"                                                                                                  
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by his pen name Mark Twain was born on November 30, 1835 and died about one hundred years ago, on April 21, 1910. Acclaimed as "the father of American literature", Twain became best known not only as a humorist but, above all, as the author of  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer  (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884 in England, 1885, in the USA)

Image Sources: Book Covers of the first editons (wikipedia.org)

If you wish to read at least these two books (no excuses now with ebooks!!!), please click on:

http://www.marktwainbooks.org/

For further infos on the author, have a look at one of my fave sites

http://www.history.com/topics/mark-twain and http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/mark-twain-is-born

You can also have a look at the author's official web site at http://www.cmgww.com/historic/twain/index.php

as well as his house and museum at http://www.marktwainhouse.org/ to learn about his legacy

Interesting would also be to know that one hundred years after his death, Mark Twain is back on the best sellers list!!! All this stir now because he insisted that his own autobiography should only be published a century after he died - as The Telegraph puts it "Mark Twain passes the ultimate writer's test - staying in print".

Some final words on this particular day... also born on the 30th November but in 1874 was Sir Winston Churchill, a British politician and statesman and widely regarded as one of the great wartime leaders; on the same day but in 1935 (seventy-five years ago) a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic and translator, and one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century - Fernando Pessoa - died.