In 1909, the most famous living American writer told his biographer that he had been born when Halley's Comet appeared in 1835 and that he expected to die when it returned in 1910. He said the Almighty had brought them in together and would take them out together. He died the day after Halley's perihelion in April 1910.

His name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. The world called him Mark Twain. He was born on the thirtieth of November, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. Halley's Comet had reached its closest approach to the sun fifteen days earlier. He had piloted Mississippi riverboats, written Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and lectured on three continents. By 1909 he was the most famous American writer in the world. He had outlived his wife and three of his four daughters. He was at his estate at Stormfield in Redding, Connecticut, dictating his autobiography to a stenographer.

In the spring of 1909, in a passage dictated for his autobiography and later quoted by his biographer Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain said: "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.'" Halley's Comet reached its 1910 perihelion on the twentieth of April, 1910. The next evening, on the twenty-first of April, 1910, Mark Twain died of a heart attack while reading in bed at Stormfield. He was seventy-four.

Twain had been born within fifteen days of one Halley's Comet perihelion and died within twenty-eight hours of the next. He had said publicly, in writing, that he would do so. He had said he would consider any other outcome the greatest disappointment of his life. Albert Bigelow Paine published the quote in his three-volume biography of Twain in 1912. The astronomical perihelion date is in the records of NASA and the Royal Astronomical Society. The Florida, Missouri parish register has the birth date. The death certificate is in the Connecticut state archive.

They knew. Subscribe.