Authors

American · 1835–1910

Mark Twain

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the supreme American humorist and satirist whose Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) — Hemingway's 'source of all modern American literature' — and Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) fixed the mythology of antebellum Mississippi forever. Born in Missouri, raised in Hannibal on the river, he worked as a printer, river pilot, miner, and journalist before his first comic success. His later work — A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Mysterious Stranger — grew darker as personal tragedy and financial failure accumulated.