Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer captured the American vernacular and conscience like no writer before him. Ernest Hemingway later declared that all modern American literature flows from Huckleberry Finn. Twain's wit, journalism, and lecturing made him the most famous American of his era.
Samuel Clemens was born two weeks after Halley's Comet's closest approach to Earth in 1835—a coincidence he loved, predicting (correctly) that he would 'go out with it' too, and he died the day after the comet's return in 1910.
He took his pen name from riverboat slang: 'mark twain' was the leadsman's call indicating two fathoms of water, a safe depth Clemens knew intimately from his years as a Mississippi steamboat pilot. That river—its people, dialects, and moral contradictions—became the lifeblood of his fiction.
Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884, wrestled directly with slavery and racism through Huck's evolving conscience about his friend Jim, written in an unvarnished regional dialect that scandalized genteel critics but revolutionized American prose. Twain spent his final years in financial ruin and grief, having outlived his wife and three of his four children, yet his humor remained legendary until the end.
Key people: Mark Twain