In fact, he loved cigars and found smoking very relaxing.
Other fun facts about the author:
- His real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
- His father died of pneumonia when he was 12, and Mark Twain became an apprentice printer at the Missouri Courier. Later, he wrote for local newspapers.
- The author also worked as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi river. He got his pen name, Mark Twain, from steamboat slang for 12 feet of water.
- During the Civil War, the writer sided with the South, and served in the Confederate Army only for a couple of weeks before heading West to San Francisco where he prospected for silver and gold before resuming his journalism career.
- Mark Twain hated his home state, Missouri, and said: “If you are born in my state, you pronounce it Missourah. If you are not born in my state, you pronounce it Missouree. But if you are born in my state, and you have to live your entire life in my state you pronounce it misery.”
- He moved to Hartford, Connecticut in 1874. Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was his neighbor.
- Mark Twain started a publishing house that soon went bankrupt. He had debts most of his life due to bad investments.
- 3 of his 4 children died before him.
- Ernest Hemingway was a fan of Mark Twain, especially of his work The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.