Mark Twain Avenue, Reno, Nevada
If the words "Mark Twain House" make you picture either his boyhood home in Hannibal or his Victorian retreat in Hartford, then Reno has got a story for you. That's because Reno has this...or used to have it, anyway...the cabin where Twain lived in 1862 when he and his brother Orion bought shares in the area's silver mines. { source } It's where Twain became Twain, when Samuel Clemens chose Mark Twain as his pen name and began writing for the Virginia City Enterprise . His experiences around Aurora, Nevada (and just a hop over the state line in California) led to his story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and his book Roughing It, which launched his career. Nevada is proud of that heritage. The Travel Nevada site proclaims: "Forget what you've heard, Nevada is the true birthplace of Mark Twain." { source } By the time Twain died in 1910, everyone wanted to have some claim to him. Aurora had become a ghost town (the mines kept f
