Near Florida, Missouri, this site preserves the two-room house where Samuel Langhorne Clemens, later known as Mark Twain, was born on November 30, 1835, and spent his first four years before his family moved to Hannibal in 1839. The rented house of Jane Lampton Clemens and John Marshall Clemens now stands enclosed within a modern museum building beside Mark Twain State Park and Mark Twain Lake. Its exhibits connect the cabin to Twain’s later life and work through a public reading room, first editions, a handwritten manuscript of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer from 1876, and furnishings from his Connecticut home. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1969, it marks the beginning of a major American literary career.