Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in 1835 in the village of Florida, Missouri, and grew up in the river town of Hannibal, on the west bank of the Mississippi, which would become — lightly fictionalized as St. Petersburg — the setting of his two most famous novels. His father, a country lawyer of perennially failing fortunes, died when Sam was eleven; the boy left school at twelve and apprenticed as a printer. He worked as a journeyman compositor in St. Louis, New York, and Philadelphia before talking a steamboat pilot named Horace Bixby into training him on the Mississippi. He earned his pilot's license in 1859 and worked the river until the Civil War shut down commercial navigation in 1861.

The pen name "Mark Twain" — a riverboat leadsman's call meaning two fathoms, the minimum safe depth — first appeared in 1863 on dispatches from the Nevada silver fields, where Clemens had gone with his brother Orion. He drifted west to San Francisco, then to Hawaii, then on a Mediterranean steamer tour that produced The Innocents Abroad (1869), the bestselling travel book of its decade and the first major commercial success of his career. He married Olivia Langdon in 1870, settled in Hartford, Connecticut, in a famously eccentric house, and spent the next two decades as the most popular American writer of his time.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) is the lighter and more conventional of the two Hannibal novels, a boys' adventure book about a clever, irrepressible white boy in a small Missouri river town in the years before the war. The famous fence-whitewashing scene, in which Tom convinces other boys to do his work by persuading them it is a privilege, has become a kind of folk-knowledge about American persuasion. The book is funny and well-paced and shows occasional flashes of the darker material Twain would develop in its sequel, but it is essentially a comic novel about childhood for an adult audience that wants to feel sentimental about it.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884, in the US 1885) is the more serious book and the one Twain's reputation rests on. Huck, the abused son of the town drunkard, fakes his own death to escape his father and floats down the Mississippi on a raft with Jim, an enslaved man who is fleeing to free territory. The novel is told in Huck's first-person vernacular, a deliberate departure from the literary English of nineteenth-century American fiction, and Hemingway's much-quoted claim that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn" overstates the case but identifies a real lineage. The central moral scene of the book, in which Huck — having been taught that helping a runaway slave is a sin — decides that he will go to hell rather than turn Jim in, is one of the great moments in American fiction. The novel is also, by any current standard, racially uncomfortable: it uses the racial slur over two hundred times, and its final section — the Tom Sawyer episodes at the Phelps farm, in which Tom turns Jim's already-completed liberation into an elaborate boys'-adventure game — has been the object of a long critical argument about whether Twain ends the book by trivializing what he had built. Jane Smiley's "Say It Ain't So, Huck" (1996) is the most famous of these critiques; Toni Morrison's introduction to the Oxford edition is the most generous defense. Both are worth reading alongside the novel.

His later years were marked by financial disaster — he invested heavily in an automatic typesetting machine that failed catastrophically — and by family tragedy: his wife and two of his three daughters predeceased him. The late writings, particularly The Mysterious Stranger and the Autobiography he dictated in the last years of his life, are markedly darker than the public Twain of platform lectures and white-suited fame. He died in 1910 at his house in Redding, Connecticut, having been born during one appearance of Halley's Comet and dying during the next, as he had predicted.

For new readers: Huckleberry Finn first, in any unabridged scholarly edition (the Norton Critical is good). Read Tom Sawyer afterward if at all. The travel books and the Autobiography are better than they have any right to be.