Mark Twain

1835–1910

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born in 1835 and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, a small town on the Mississippi River. He was a printer, a riverboat pilot and a silver miner before he found he could make people laugh in print. His pen name is a riverboat call: two fathoms of water, safe to pass.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) is drawn from his own boyhood in Hannibal. Its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), follows Tom's friend Huck down the river. He died in 1910.

Mark Twain on the site

The Adventures of Tom SawyerPublished in 1876 About 5 hours read Tom Sawyer lives with his Aunt Polly in a small town on the Mississippi, and would rather do anything than go to school. He tricks the other boys into whitewashing his fence for him, falls for the new girl, Becky Thatcher, and runs off to an island to be a pirate with Huckleberry Finn. Then one night in the graveyard the two boys see a murder. Mark Twain's 1876 novel of boyhood on the river. Adventures of Huckleberry FinnPublished in 1884 About 8 hours read Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer's friend, is being civilized by the Widow Douglas and hates it. When his drunken father turns up and locks him in a cabin, Huck fakes his own death and escapes to an island in the Mississippi, where he finds Jim, Miss Watson's slave, who has run away. Together on a raft they drift down the river. Mark Twain's 1884 novel, told in Huck's own voice.

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