Mark Twain

It was on this day 100 years ago that the man who's often quoted as saying "The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated" did, in fact, really die. What Mark Twain actually said to the journalist who came to his door in 1897 to investigate his presumed fatality was "The report of my death is an exaggeration," but the various misquotes about Mark Twain's denial of death have taken on lives of their own.It wasn't the first time Twain would be forced to fend off rumors about his death. A decade after his legendary repudiation, The New York Times printed a premature obituary for Mr. Twain. He'd taken a steamboat trip with some friends from New York to Virginia for the Jamestown Exposition of 1907. While they were there, thick fog nestled in along the coast, reducing visibility and making it temporarily unsafe to travel by boat. Twain's friends opted for alternative transportation and took the train, but Twain didn't really like rail travel, so he decided to wait till the fog cleared and then return by boat. So he was delayed. By now he was a huge American celebrity with reporters tracking his whereabouts. When he didn't appear in the New York Harbor on the day he was scheduled to arrive, The New York Times ran a story announcing that he must be "lost at sea." A couple weeks later, the 71-year-old Mark Twain wrote up a mock article for The New York Times,which ran under the headline: "MARK TWAIN INVESTIGATING. And If the Report That He's Lost at Sea is So, He'll Let the Public Know."Two years after the lost-at-sea speculation, in 1909, 73-year-old Mark Twain proclaimed: "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.'"He was eerily accurate in his prescience. He died of a heart attack that next year, on this day exactly one century ago — April 21, 1910 — at the age of 74, precisely one day after Halley's Comet's closest approach to Earth. He was buried next to his wife in Upstate New York. His only surviving child placed next to his grave a monument that was 12 feet long, or two fathoms deep — the depth at which it's safe for an average steamboat to pass, a riverboat expression known as "Mark Twain," from which Samuel Clemens chose his pen name.