On this day in 1910, Mark Twain, one of America’s most famous authors and Connecticut’s most famous residents, died at his home in Redding, Connecticut. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, he grew up in Missouri and traveled extensively, working as a newspaper reporter and fiction writer, until settling with his family in 1871 in the wealthy “Nook Farm” neighborhood of Hartford.  Nook Farm became known for its concentration of notable authors, artists, and other creative personalities, which (in addition to Twain) included Harriet Beecher Stowe.  There, in his magnificent, custom-built Victorian mansion, Twain wrote and published some of his most famous and historically-significant works, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and (of course) A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

Twain spent the last years of his life with his family at Stormfield, a spacious Italian-style country estate in Redding, Connecticut completed in 1908.  The internationally-famous author entertained a number of prestigious guests at Stormfield, including the inventor Thomas Edison, who captured what is thought to be the only film footage of Mark Twain in existence using a Kinetograph camera in 1909.

That same year (in 1909), Twain had predicted his own death with his trademark irreverence:

“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. The Almighty has said, no doubt: “Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.”

True to his prediction, Twain died of a heart attack at his Redding home in 1910, just after Halley’s comet shined its brightest, on this day in Connecticut history.

Further Reading

“About Mark Twain,” The Mark Twain House and Museum

Jenifer Frank, “Hartford’s Nook Farm,” connecticuthistory.org

Brent Colley, “Mark Twain’s Redding, Connecticut home: Stormfield,” historyofredding.net