As a baby, he wasn’t expected to live

On November 30, 1835, in the little Missouri town of Florida, Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born two months early. He remained weak and ill until he was eight years old. When he was eight, a measles outbreak—then potentially fatal—frightened him so much that, to relax, he purposefully exposed himself to infection by getting into bed with his buddy Will Bowen. Only three of the seven children, including Clemens, lived to maturity.

John Marshall, Clemens' father, a self-taught lawyer who also owned a general shop, relocated his family to Hannibal, Missouri, in 1839 in quest of greater business possibilities. Hannibal, Missouri, a port city on the Mississippi River that inspired the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Although he had financial difficulties, John Marshall Clemens was appointed a judge of the peace in Hannibal. His father, 49-year-old Samuel Clemens, passed away from pneumonia when he was eleven.