Mark Twain Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens. (1835 — 1910) A famous American writer, entrepreneur, publisher and lecturer. Among Twain's best-known novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Prince and the Pauper, and others. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) tells the story of a Yankee engineer from Connecticut who is accidentally transported back in time to the court of King Arthur, where he fools the inhabitants of that time into thinking that he is a magician. Twain was inspired to write this book by a dream in which he was a knight himself, severely inconvenienced by the weight and cumbersome nature of his armor.