Famous Former Buffalonian Celebrates Major Birthday

It's not often that someone turns 189 years old, but that exact thing happened today, Saturday, November 30, 2024, as Mr. Samuel Langhorne Clemens has the honor of having his birthday celebrated all over the nation. If the name Samuel Langhorne Clemens doesn't sound familiar to you, maybe his nom de plume, Mark Twain, is a little more recognizable.

Twain, a world-famous writer and essayist who was once called the greatest humorist that was ever produced, has connections to many places around America during his lifetime, but it's his connection to Buffalo that holds a special place in his life and the history of Western New York. The author of classics like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today called Buffalo home for a few years during the late 1800s, where he made a few significant decisions that impacted his life.

READ MORE: 10 Famous People You Didn’t Know Were Buffalonians

In 1868, Twain started courting his future wife, Olivia Langdon, and he made his home in Buffalo. During his time in Western New York, not only did he help to create the Buffalo Morning Express newspaper, which later merged with the Buffalo Courier to make the Courier Express, and he also made friendships with activists Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and William Dean Howells, all of whom were known to be in Western New York quite a bit. Twain also had a lifelong friendship with Nikola Tesla, who helped to revolutionize power generation and transmission in Niagara Falls, New York.

It was in 1871 when Twain and his family moved from Buffalo and made their home in Hartford, Connecticut. While his time in Western New York was relatively short, the region impacted his life. He's currently buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, New York, and many of his original papers and writings, including the original handwritten manuscript of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, are stored in the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library's Mark Twain Room.

If you want to learn more about Twain's time in Buffalo, you can check out this essay written by the Buffalo Public Library here.

Happy Birthday, Mark Twain.