Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, in the village of Florida, Missouri. Although his early life was spent in Missouri, Clemens left home as a young man and traveled around the United States, often picking up temporary printing jobs or other odd jobs to fund his adventures.

Travel remained a big part of Clemens's life and he experienced many of the different types of travel available to people in the nineteenth century. From working as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, Clemens moved out west, traveling by stagecoach. It was in the west that he began to publish his own writing, including his first book, a collection of humorous tales, in 1867. In fact, Clemens's frontier-style humor became a trademark in many of his future publications. "The Invalid's Story"—which is believed to have been written in 1877, and which was first published as...