Mark Twain

Samuel Clemens took his pen name from a riverboat call ('mark twain,' two fathoms deep, safe water) after four years piloting steamboats on the Mississippi ended with the Civil War. He drifted west to Nevada as a failed prospector, found work as a newspaperman, and discovered his voice as a platform lecturer years before it reached the page.

Fame made him reckless. He sank a fortune into a doomed automatic typesetter, went bankrupt in his fifties, and spent years lecturing around the world to pay off creditors. The deaths that followed (his wife Olivia, then two of his three daughters) darkened everything he wrote after Huckleberry Finn; the late fiction, much of it unpublished in his lifetime, turned savage and nihilistic.

He was born the month Halley's Comet appeared in 1835 and predicted he'd 'go out with it.' He died in 1910, the night after its return.