Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born November 30, 1835, in Monroe County, Missouri, was never one to let the facts get in the way of a good story. An indefatigable inventor of tall tales, Mark Twain was a natural—born storyteller who freely adapted the incidents of his life and the tales he heard as a youth to embellish his fiction—as well as his travel writing and memoirs. However captivating this technique may be for Twain’s readers, for the modern biographer it poses a real problem: in account...