Twain In 1835, Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born to John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton in the small town of Florida, Missouri. The Clemensą family wasnąt at all rich, but four years after Samuel was born, they moved to the even smaller Missouri town of Hannibal, population 500, (Hoffman 2). It would be Hannibal that would inspire some of Clemensą most famous books. Hannibal was a river town, visited by all sorts of travelers moving upstream and downstream. There were steamboat men, revivalists, circus performers, minstrel companies, showboat actors, ect. It was not strange, therefore, that Hannibal and the people who Clemens encountered there were destin