Birthdays of L.M. Montgomery and Mark Twain
Next: November 30, 2026
Anne, Huck and a shared birthday.
The story
Where it comes from
This Story marks a shared birthday. Mark Twain was born Samuel Clemens in Florida, Missouri, on 30 November 1835, grew up in Hannibal on the Mississippi, and wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in Clifton (now New London), Prince Edward Island, on 30 November 1874. Raised by her grandparents in Cavendish, she wrote Anne of Green Gables there, and it was an instant success when it appeared in 1908. Both turned the places they grew up into some of fiction's best-loved settings.
How it's celebrated
Readers visit Green Gables Heritage Place in Cavendish, part of Prince Edward Island National Park, and Montgomery's grave in the Cavendish cemetery. Twain's Boyhood Home and Museum in Hannibal, Missouri, and the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, welcome readers through the year. At home, it is a good day to read a chapter aloud.
Did you know
- Twain's pen name is a riverboat call: 'mark twain' meant the water was two fathoms, about 3.7 metres, deep.
- Twain was born in a year Halley's Comet appeared and predicted he would 'go out with it'; he died on 21 April 1910, the day after the comet's closest approach to the Sun.
- In Japan, Hanako Muraoka's translation Akage no An ('Red-haired Anne') was published in 1952, the book entered schools after the war, and Isao Takahata's 1979 anime helped make it the best-loved Canadian story in the country.
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