How Did Mark Twain Know the Exact Year He Would Die?

In 1835, a comet blazed across the sky. Two weeks later, a boy named Samuel Clemens was born in rural Missouri.

Seventy-four years later, the same comet was returning. Mark Twain — who had by then made the whole world laugh, who had buried his wife and two of his daughters, who had gone bankrupt and clawed his way back — made a prediction.

"I came in with Halley's Comet," he said in 1909. "It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it."

On April 21, 1910, the day after Halley's Comet reached its closest point to the sun, Mark Twain died.

He was right.

Most of us spend our lives trying not to think about the end. Twain spent his final year making jokes about it, placing himself in the universe's story, finding it funny that a comet and a boy had been linked since the beginning.

He didn't rage against the dying of the light. He rode it like a river.