In the course of doing our research for book reviews, we tend to come across some pretty interesting bits of information about the life of authors, which usually have little relevance for the books in question themselves, but are nonetheless fascinating in their own right. Therefore, we've decided to start a new monthly segment, sharing some of our favorite, and most surprising, facts about the people behind the stories.

For our first edition, we'll be focusing on non other than the white suit wearing, moustache sporting father of American literature - Mark Twain.

mark twain facts who was samuel clemens — Did you know any of these surprising Mark Twain facts?

Mark Twain is widely credited with writing what is considered to be the first great American novel - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But the young troublemaker's tale of adventure and friendship is not the only legacy the author left behind. He lived an incredibly colorful life, writing more than a dozen other novels, inventing products, traveling the world and developing a strong affinity for a certain house type of house pet.

Did you know these ten surprising facts about Mark Twain?

As a baby he was never expected to survive
Mark Twain is not his real name
He used to work as a miner
It took him 7 years to finish The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
He invented a board game
At one point, he had 19 cats
He is one of the most misquoted writers in history
He predicted his own death almost to the day
He was a notoriously bad investor
He has no living descendants

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mark twain facts — Top 10 Mark Twain Facts - Did you know that Mark Twain was not expected to survive as a baby?

As a baby, he wasn't expected to survive!

What would the world be, without Mark Twain in it? Thankfully, we never have to know the answer to that question, yet the literary world came disturbingly close to never knowing one of it's most brilliant and fascinating figures.

Twain was born 2 months prematurely on November 30th, 1835 in Florida and remained sickly throughout the first seven years of his childhood. Financial struggles and lack of proper medical care stacked the odds against his family, as he was one of only three siblings (from 7 in total) to survive to adulthood.

Mark Twain wasn’t his actual name!

Surprise, surprise! Mark Twain is actually an alias, which the author assumed early on in his career. He was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens and he tried out a number of different names - including the hilariously sounding Sergeant Fathom and Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, before settling on the one that the world came to know and love.

"Mark Twain" supposedly refers to two fathoms (12 feet or 3.6 meters) deep, in boat slang. There have been many theories as to where and how exactly he picked the name. Twain eventually confessed to swiping it from a captain named Isiah Sellers, who used it at the New Orleans Picayune. This however, has never been corroborated by any other source and to this day remains a subject of much debate.

Personally, I'm a huge fan of the urban legend, according to which Mark Twain used to walk into a bar and shout out "mark twain", prompting the bartender to mark twain (or two) drinks on the wall with chalk. Sounds like a great way to keep sights of your bar tab, doesn't it?

He used to work as a miner!

Twain was definitely not afraid to try a variety of different jobs. Apart from working on an actual steamboat, he also worked as a miner in Nevada, where Samuel and his brother fled to, in order to avoid the American Civil War. Unfortunately for them, the war greatly affected the mining trade, which by itself was hard and dismal.

Luckily, he didn't have a long stint as a miner, as he quickly got his first writing job for Virginia City's Territorial Enterprise newspaper, where he was tasked with covering crime, politics, culture, and to some disappointment from his end - mining.

It took 7 years to write The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn!

Inspiration is a fickle mistress - she can derail a writer's journey on a whim, just as easily as she can provide the missing piece to fit a novel together. Following the success of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, Mark Twain began working on the sequel but after about 400 pages he just wasn't feeling it.

He famously told a friend he liked it "only tolerably well, as far as I have got, and may possibly pigeonhole or burn" the manuscript. Thankfully, he didn't burn it but he did put it on hold for several years, before a sudden burst of inspiration struck, prompting him to finally finish it in 1883.

He invented a board game!

What do you do when you're procrastinating on writing the next great American novel? You create a board game, obviously!

Twain is credited with the creation of a game, he himself dubbed "Memory Builder". The game was aptly named, as it required a vast knowledge of historical facts and trivia. It's biggest strength was also, unfortunately, what made the game nearly unmarketable. It's commercial flop never stopped Twain from patenting it, though, and working on it for almost two years.

At one point, he had 19 cats!

We have a really close friend, who would be ecstatic to find out that her life trajectory shares at least one trait with Twain's life.

Twain absolutely adored cats - he would even "rent" cats to keep him company while he travelled. He was so bedazzled with the felines, that at some point he had 19 of them at the same time. We can only imagine the smell in his apartment. No mice though, so at least that's a plus.

When asked about his cat obsession, Twain retorted that he found cats much preferable to humans, even going as far as saying that "If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat".

Fun fact: Twain's literary tone is marked by witticism and humorous remarks, reflected in real life by some of the names he gave his feline companions: Blatherskite, Buffalo Bill, Sour Marsh, Zoroaster, and our personal favorites - Pestilence, Beelzebub and Satan.

He is one of the most misquoted authors of all time!

Seriously, go to any "self-help" or "motivation" page on Instagram and you can't scroll for 5 minutes without running into a quote attributed to Mark Twain. Funnily enough, a vast majority of these quotes are either misquoted or belong to completely different people. Our guess? We think that people just like using Twain's picture due to his glorious moustache and piercing gaze.

One of his most well-known quotes, "It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt" is actually a dumbed-down version of what he actually said: " [He] was endowed with a stupidity which by the least little stretch would go around the globe four times and tie".

He predicted when he would die... Accurately!

As unbelievable as it sounds, Twain managed to predict his own death almost to the day. As he commented in 1909, "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.’ Oh, I am looking forward to that."

Mark Twain passed away in his home on April 21, 1910 - exactly one day after Halley's Comet's perihelion.

He was a notoriously bad investor!

There is a famous quote by Robert T. Kiyosaki, author of the best-selling book Rich Dad Poor Dad, which goes like this: "A person can be highly educated, professionally successful, and financially illiterate". Unfortunately, this saying describes Mark Twain's investment capabilities perfectly.

After becoming a successful writer, he put his money in multiple bad investments, none of which turned profitable and he soon went bankrupt. Sadly enough, a few of these flopped investments were in his own inventions and patents, some of which, like his automatic typesetting machine, proved so costly they put him in severe debt.

Nonetheless, the writer managed to pay off all his debtors in full by conducting multiple highly profitable (and physically taxing) lecture tours around the world.

His line of descendants was ended by 1966!

Personally, we find this the saddest part of this list. While Twain's life certainly had it's fair of tragedies - including financial and health struggles, and the death of his father when he was only 11 - his descendants faired little better.

In 1870, Twain married Olivia Langdon and the two had four children. One child died as a toddler and another two passed away in their 20s. Olivia herself died in 1904 at the age of 58, followed by her famous husband only 6 years later.

The surviving child, Clara, lived to the ripe age of 88 and passed away in 1962. Clara had only one child, Nina, who passed away shortly after her mother (1966), childless and with no heirs to the family name.

Thus, unfortunately, by 1966 the line of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who the world will forever remember as Mark Twain, ended. But while his direct descendants might be gone, Twain will be forever survived by two fictional children that he fathered - Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

Did you like our list of top 10 Mark Twain facts? Let us know in the comments below!

Top 10 Mark Twain Facts - Who was Samuel Clemens?