He was born in a town so small that, as he later wrote, he "increased the population by 1 per cent." He liked to jest that he "could have done it for any place--even London, I suppose." His father and mother, John Marshall and Jane Lampton Clemens, had rented a two-room clapboard house in Florida, Missouri, about 100 feet from the store owned by their brother-in-law, John Quarles, whom Twain later immortalized both in
Life on the Mississippi and in
Mark Twain's Autobiography (1924). The house still stands in which Sam Clemens was born thirteen days after Halley's Comet reached its perihelion. He often said that just as he came in with the comet, so he would go out with it, and so indeed he did. The comet worked on his imagination, but the house did not. Far more important were both the Quarles farm and the town in which Sam grew up, Hannibal, where the family moved in 1839. Sam, the third of four sons, was the fifth of the six children who kept adding their weight to the slender reed that was the family fortune.
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