The Birthplace of Mark Twain

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, a village of about 100 people. He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River, and his childhood memories of the river and the characters he encountered there formed the raw material for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain worked as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi from 1857 to 1861, and the pen name he later adopted is a river term meaning two fathoms deep, the minimum safe depth for a steamboat.

Source: Wikipedia