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Mark
Twain

1835  —  1910
Historical Archive  ·  Portrait Study
Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Florida, Missouri, 1835  ·  Redding, Connecticut, 1910

Riverboat pilot, prospector, travel writer, and the closest thing America produced to a national conscience in a funny hat. He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, with the Mississippi River and slavery as facts of life. He turned both of them into literature that is still argued about today.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is the most contested novel in American high school syllabi and probably the most honest book ever written about what American freedom meant when it was built on enslavement. The ending is a disaster. He knew it. He said so.

He outlived most of the people he loved, went bankrupt and paid every cent back, and spent his final years writing things too dark to publish. He left instructions that some of it should wait a hundred years. He has been watching what you did with the country in the meantime.

Consultation

Talk to the man who
turned America into a joke.

Twain speaks from 3,000+ chunks of his own words across seven major works — Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and What Is Man?

His discourse collection holds Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Emerson's Essays, and Mencken's Prejudices. He knows the writers who came before and after him. He has opinions.

Ask him about Huck Finn's moral decision. Ask him about the ending. Ask him what it was like to grow up surrounded by slavery and think it was normal. Ask him about God, the human race, or the funniest thing that happened on the Mississippi in 1857.

He will not be solemn about it. He never was. That is how he told the truth.

American Literature Race and Slavery Huckleberry Finn Mississippi River Political Satire The American West Travel Writing The Human Condition Progress and Irony American Hypocrisy
All right, then, I'll go to hell.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  ·  1884  ·  The most important sentence in American literature

Drawn From the Corpus