Mark Twain’s Youth in Missouri

After Sam Clemens’s parents abandoned their hopes of prospering in Florida, Missouri, in 1839, they moved about thirty-five miles northeast to the Mississippi River port town of Hannibal, where Sam spent most of his formative years. Sam would later give that town a form of literary immortality by making it the fictional “St. Petersburg” in his writings about Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Those works would eventually include two published novels, two published novellas—Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)—and three unfinished stories that would eventually be published posthumously. It is generally believed Mark Twain chose the name “St. Petersburg” for his fictional town to symbolize its being a “heavenly” place for children—especially boys. Whether or not he saw Hannibal as a heavenly place during his boyhood, it is clear that many of the activities in which characters engage in his stories are things he and his boyhood friends had done in Hannibal. For example, he based the famous episode in Tom Sawyer in which Tom and his sweetheart Becky Thatcher get lost in a labyrinthine cave on an incident that really happened to him.

Young Sam Clemens did nothing during his youth that could have given anyone any reason to imagine the incredible life that lay ahead for Mark Twain, but one of the hallmarks of his best writing would be his skill at converting the grist from his own life into poignant fiction. The grist he milled from his youth in Hannibal was extraordinarily bountiful. His life there and in the even smaller inland village of Florida, where he spent many of his summers while growing up—would provide the primary settings not only for Tom Sawyer and the opening chapters of Huckleberry Finn but also for parts of The Gilded Age (1874), which he coauthored with Charles Dudley Warner, and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894). The latter novel transforms Hannibal into “Dawson’s Landing,” which is located south of St. Louis, unlike St. Petersburg, which—like the real Hannibal—is well north of that major river port. However, while its name and location may differ from those of St. Petersburg, it is essentially the same place.

St. Petersburg’s heavenly imagery has not been lost on modern Hannibal, which has built a healthy tourist industry around its ties to Mark Twain and used those ties to advertise itself as “America’s Home Town.” While the town has long emphasized its connections with Tom Sawyer, it has had much less to say about Huckleberry Finn. Some reasons should be obvious. The earlier novel is set entirely within or near Hannibal’s fictional clone of St. Petersburg, while Huckleberry Finn merely begins there and soon moves down the river. Tom Sawyer also has more tangible connections with Hannibal, most notably in the form of Mark Twain’s own boyhood home, on which Tom’s fictional home is closely modeled, and the home of Laura Hawkins, the real-life girl on whom Mark Twain modeled Becky Thatcher. Both houses still stand as fully restored tourist attractions. Nearby are the island and cave that play important roles in Tom Sawyer, and a local promontory has been renamed “Cardiff Hill” after the similar fictional hill in the novels. (The latter is a true case of life imitating art.)

Huckleberry Finn has some tangible ties to Hannibal, too, beginning with the town itself, the island, the cave, and Cardiff Hill. Another reason Hannibal has emphasized its ties to Tom Sawyer rather than Huckleberry Finn has been its discomfort with the latter novel’s far greater attention to African American slavery—a subject whose local history the town has been uncomfortable addressing. Happily, in recent years, the city has moved to bring Huckleberry Finn more fully into its tourist industry. In 2006, a “Huck Finn House” was opened as a replica of the home in which the boyhood friend of Mark Twain who inspired the fictional Huck had lived. Even more significantly, in 2013, Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center opened nearby to honor the memory of the fictional slave who accompanies Huck on his journey down the Mississippi and to commemorate the historical contributions of Hannibal’s African American residents.

One of the most important ties of Huckleberry Finn to Sam Clemens’s youth is the book’s language. The novel was highly unusual for its time—indeed, it was virtually revolutionary—in being narrated entirely in the vernacular voice of its unschooled protagonist, Huck Finn. Moreover, not only does Huck tell his story in the often coarse and ungrammatical language of a mid-nineteenth-century backwoods Missouri boy, he also passes along the dialogue of other characters in their own distinct regional dialects—which number seven varieties, according to Mark Twain’s count. The most important—and most vocal—other character is Huck’s co-protagonist, Jim, who speaks in what Mark Twain labeled the “Missouri negro dialect.” The youthful Sam Clemens learned that dialect from long and often close contact with slaves in Hannibal and especially those on his uncle’s Florida farm who were his boyhood playmates. Mark Twain had a good ear for language that enabled him to reproduce African American speech accurately. In addition to narrating Huckleberry Finn, Huck also narrates Tom Sawyer Abroad; Tom Sawyer, Detective; and two of the three Tom and Huck stories Mark Twain never finished.

Mark Twain’s Transition to Adulthood

Located on what was then the edge of America’s western frontier during Sam Clemens’s boyhood, Hannibal was a technologically primitive community, lacking either railroad or telegraph links with other regions during his time. Its main connections to the outside world were through the steamboat packets that regularly stopped at its docks. It was not a promising place to produce a writer who would one day be regarded as one of America’s great authors, but the fact that it actually did so invites reflection on why. His experiences in Florida and Hannibal clearly planted many of the seeds that would later blossom in his writing. Had he grown up almost anywhere else, he almost certainly would never have written Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn.

Because of the limited educational opportunities in his community as well as the impoverished condition of his family that required him to go to work at an early age, Sam Clemens received little formal education. Nevertheless, he early became and always remained a prodigious reader who would eventually become one of the great self-educated figures of his time. Between reading adventure stories and daydreaming about traveling to faraway places, while watching steamboats ply the nearby river, he developed a lifelong thirst for travel and especially wanted to venture out on steamboats. A nostalgic passage in Life on the Mississippi (1883) recalls that boyhood longing:

Although written for Life on the Mississippi, that paragraph says a lot about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Modern film treatments notwithstanding, neither Tom nor Huck ever works on a steamboat, but steamboats play important roles several times in Huckleberry Finn. The circuses, minstrel shows, and pirate games Sam Clemens enjoyed as a boy were clearly on his mind when he was writing his novels. Circuses and pirates are mentioned frequently throughout Tom Sawyer, and a pretend pirate (the King) makes an unforgettable appearance at a religious camp meeting in chapter 20 of Huckleberry Finn. A minstrel show comes to St. Petersburg in chapter 22 of Tom Sawyer, and Huck attends a circus in chapter 22 of his own novel. Sam Clemens himself eventually defied the long odds against fulfilling his boyhood dream by becoming a real steamboatman well before he would become “Mark Twain.”

In 1853, Sam Clemens left Hannibal for good to begin several years of working as a journeyman printer in newspaper offices and printshops in the Midwest and East. The fact that he left home and traveled to the East Coast on his own before he even turned eighteen says a great deal about both his desire to travel and his courage in striking out on his own. The next major turning point in his life came in early 1857, when he persuaded a master steamboat pilot named Horace Bixby to take him on as an apprentice. He then spent the four years leading up to the outbreak of the Civil War piloting boats between St. Louis and New Orleans. Bixby remained working on the river until his death at the age of eighty-six. Were it not for the Civil War, Sam Clemens very likely would also have continued in that profession indefinitely. “I supposed—and hoped,” he wrote in Life on the Mississippi, “that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel when my mission was ended. But by and by the war came, commerce was suspended, my occupation was gone” (chapter 21). If that terrible war had any positive outcomes—besides the noble one of forcing an end to human slavery—they included redirecting Sam Clemens to a career that would lead to his becoming “Mark Twain” and writing Huckleberry Finn. It is not an exaggeration, therefore, to suggest that without the Civil War, the world would never have heard of Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, or a host of other memorable fictional creations.

While Mark Twain’s years in Missouri helped prepare him to write about his boyhood there, his years of piloting boats on the Lower Mississippi prepared him to write about the river, which he later did, and at length, in many books—most notably Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn. The river also figures prominently in Tom Sawyer, but what that novel says about it are things that almost anyone who grew up around a river town like Hannibal would have known from their daily experiences of observing the river, taking occasional swims, and boating or rafting to nearby islands. In contrast, what Huckleberry Finn says about the river would have been impossible for Mark Twain to write without the deep knowledge he had gained as a pilot. Moreover, it was not a coincidence that he worked on both Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn at virtually the same time. The first book grew out of a series of articles titled “Old Times on the Mississippi” that he published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1875. Those articles offered a poignant, very personal, and embellished memoir of his experiences as an apprentice steamboat pilot under Horace Bixby. The central theme of the series was that each time, the cub pilot thinks he has finally “learned” the river, he discovers his education has actually only barely begun:

He goes on to recall having to relearn the river yet again from another new perspective. This theme of having to learn something over and over became, in a sense, a metaphor for Mark Twain’s life. His experience as a pilot trained him to realize that one’s education is never complete, and he never wanted to stop learning. Perhaps the same observation may be made about Huck’s experiences in Huckleberry Finn, in which each time he learns to adjust to new circumstances, something happens that forces him to start over and relearn how to deal with the people he encounters along the river.

Writing Huckleberry Finn

In 1876, the year after finishing his “Old Times” articles, Mark Twain published Tom Sawyer, his first solo novel. He then started on another novel—the one that would become Huckleberry Finn. His progress on that book would be slowed by work on other books, travel, and temporary lapses in interest. When he finally completed it in 1884, he was busy organizing his new publishing firm. Production complications delayed the book’s American release until early 1885 (which is why the English edition came out first, at the end of the previous year). Meanwhile, he had returned to the Mississippi River in 1882 to gather new material for Life on the Mississippi, which he published the following year. That book expanded The Atlantic Monthly articles about cub piloting, adding chapters about his 1882 trip describing how much the river had changed since his piloting days. His return to the river doubtless rekindled his motivation to finish Huckleberry Finn, which is replete with moving descriptions of the river, such as this idyllic passage from chapter 19, in which Huck and Jim are relaxing on their raft:

Lines like those could only have been written by someone with an intimate familiarity with the river—someone like Mark Twain. Mark Twain’s deep familiarity with the river, however, occasionally caused him to go a little too far in ascribing a similar familiarity to Huck. In this next passage, from chapter 12, for example, Huck seems to know more about both the river and steamboating than a boy who has apparently never even been on a steamboat should:

Terms such as “upstream boats,” “crossing,” “channel,” and “easy water” would have issued easily from the mouth or pen of an experienced pilot, but probably not from an inexperienced boy. It is also doubtful that Huck would be able to read the significance of the river’s “very low banks”—the type of skill that Life on the Mississippi’s cub pilot struggled hard to learn.

Mark Twain’s Continuing Travels

Visits to St. Louis; Cincinnati; New York; Philadelphia; Washington, DC; and other places during the early 1850s and his years on the Mississippi satisfied part of Sam Clemens’s urge to travel, but his wanderlust continued to grow. In 1861, as the Civil War began to rage, he went west with his older brother, Orion Clemens, whom President Abraham Lincoln appointed secretary of the government of the new federal territory of Nevada. In Roughing It (1872), the book he later wrote about his experiences in the Far West, he reiterated his dream of traveling, in the words of an inexperienced, young naïf who had never before been anywhere:

This was gross exaggeration, of course, as Sam Clemens had actually been away from home, traveling almost continuously, over the eight years leading up to his journey to the West. It is also, however, an honest reflection of his deep desire to see the world at large. Some of that interest can also be seen in Huckleberry Finn, whose ignorant, backwoods title character seems to have inherited some of his creator’s interest in reading. Scattered throughout Huck’s narrative are numerous mentions of books he reads. In chapter 14, for example, he names “a lot of books” that he and Jim find among the “truck” stolen by the gang of murderers on whose skiff they escape from the wrecked steamboat Walter Scott. The next day, they rest “in the woods talking, and me reading the books, and having a general good time.” As Huck later settles into the Grangerford home, he talks about the family’s books he reads in chapter 17. For a boy who can barely read his own name at the beginning of his narrative, he seems to have progressed surprisingly far in his self-education by this time.

After the scoundrels who call themselves the king of France and the duke of Bridgewater board Jim and Huck’s raft in chapter 19, Huck is quick to see them for the frauds they are but does not immediately let on to Jim what he thinks. Later, in chapter 23, he draws on his apparently substantial reading to explain to Jim how “all kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur as I can make out.” As he goes on to explain his view, he offers example after example from European history, much of which he mixes up and even throws in irrelevant allusions to The Arabian Nights:

Huck clearly exhibits a greater knowledge of the world than a child with his background is likely to have. If that is a false note in the novel, blame it on Mark Twain’s own knowledge of the world, which was extensive by the time he wrote Huckleberry Finn.

Physical settings were not the only memories that Mark Twain mined in his fiction. His own family members and Hannibal friends and neighbors would also provide models for many of his characters in both his Tom and Huck tales and other writings. Matching Tom Sawyer with a real-life person has always proven tricky because of Mark Twain’s coyness on that subject, though he sometimes claimed he himself was Tom. Other characters are easier to connect with his real-life contemporaries. For example, he explicitly identified his younger brother, Henry Clemens, as the model for Tom Sawyer’s younger half-brother, Sid, though he also added that Henry was a finer person than Sid ever was. Sid figures prominently in Tom Sawyer but appears only momentarily in Huckleberry Finn—on the steam-ferry searching for Huck’s presumably drowned body in chapter 8. Later, in chapter 32, when Tom reappears in the narrative, he finds Huck in the home of his Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas Phelps. They believe Huck to be Tom, so Tom then pretends to be Sid from that point.

Mark Twain clearly modeled Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly on his own mother, Jane Lampton Clemens. Aunt Polly is a major character in Tom Sawyer, and she makes a major appearance in the last chapters of Huckleberry Finn. Tom’s cousin Mary (whose surname is unknown) is modeled on Mark Twain’s sister Pamela Clemens. She appears frequently in Tom Sawyer, but like Sid, she surfaces only once in Huckleberry Finn, in the brief steam-ferry scene in chapter 8. Of much greater interest are Mark Twain’s models for Huck himself and for Jim. In contrast to uncertainty about a model for Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain explicitly identified his boyhood friend Tom Blankenship as his Huck in a 1906 autobiographical dictation:

During Mark Twain’s lifetime and afterward, numerous men stepped forward claiming to have been the original Huckleberry Finn, but that honor almost certainly belongs to Blankenship, whose eventual fate is not known. Like the fictional Pap Finn, incidentally, Blankenship’s father was notorious as a town drunk.

Evidence for Mark Twain’s models for the escaping African American slave Jim is more complicated. He appears to belong to what Mark Twain called “the composite order of architecture” when he described Tom Sawyer as having a combination of the characteristic of three different boys in his preface to Tom Sawyer. Three African American men contributed to his creation of Jim. The first was a slave on his Uncle John Quarles’s Florida farm whom he knew as Uncle Dan’l. In an autobiographical extract, he described Dan’l as a wise and good friend and adviser:

That endearing tribute to Dan’l would apply equally well to Huckleberry Finn’s Jim, whose patience, honesty, simplicity, and warm heart Huck repeatedly describes. Huck also praises Jim several times for having “an uncommon level head” (e.g., chapters 14 & 16). Mark Twain’s autobiographical passage, of course, explicitly links Dan’l to Huckleberry Finn’s Jim as well. His comment about the journey across the Sahara refers to Tom Sawyer Abroad, in which Tom, Huck, and Jim travel across the Atlantic Ocean and North Africa in a balloon craft built by a mad scientist.

A second candidate for Jim’s model is George Griffin, a former slave who was the Clemens family butler in Hartford, Connecticut, from the late 1870s until the family left for Europe in 1891. An immensely competent man whom Mark Twain greatly respected, he was virtually a member of the Clemens family at the very time Mark Twain was writing Huckleberry Finn. A possibly telling clue is this enigmatic “Notice” that precedes the novel:

The identity of “G. G” has never been firmly established. Those initials might very well belong to George Griffin.

The third major candidate for Jim’s model is John T. Lewis, a free-born African American from Maryland who farmed on the property of Mark Twain’s sister-in-law, Susan Crane, outside Elmira, New York. Mark Twain knew Lewis well during the period he was writing Huckleberry Finn and had a high regard for him, too—especially after he saw Lewis risk his life to stop a runaway carriage from killing several people. Mark Twain was particularly intrigued by Lewis’s strong religious opinions.

Success and Its Aftermath

In 1885, Mark Twain appeared to have reached a point at which his success was assured. His newest book, Huckleberry Finn was a publishing success, and his firm’s next publication, General Ulysses S. Grant’s two-volume Civil War memoirs would prove to be one of the best-selling works of the nineteenth century. Mark Twain himself was at the height of his creative powers and was one of the highest-paid authors in the world. He lived in a magnificent custom-built home in Hartford, Connecticut, had a loving wife and three adoring daughters. Some significant works still lay in his future—most notably A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)—but by the 1890s, his creative powers were beginning to wane. During that decade, he and his wife, Olivia, closed down their Hartford house—to which they would never return—and relocated their family to Europe to cut down on household expenses. Over the next decade, the family moved from country to country, with a major interruption in 1895–1896.

That interruption was caused by the collapse of Mark Twain’s most costly business ventures. In 1894, the publishing company he had launched a decade earlier declared bankruptcy. Around the same time, the revolutionary automatic typesetting machine in which he had invested a fortune and had hoped would make him rich beyond his dreams was finally pronounced too unreliable to be marketable, causing him instead to lose his entire investment. Despite having reached a pinnacle of success as an author, he suddenly found himself a business failure, just as his father had been. To recover his fortunes and pay off his publishing firm’s creditors, he left from England in May 1895 to undertake an exhausting round-the-word lecture tour that started in North America and took him to Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa. When he returned to England in August 1896, he wrote Following the Equator about his long trip. Meanwhile, he and his wife were shattered by the sudden death of their oldest daughter, Susy. With much of the joy sucked out of their lives, the family continued to move about in Europe until October 1900, when they returned to the United States. There Mark Twain found himself more admired and celebrated than ever before, in large part because of his success in paying off his bankrupt company’s creditors in full when he could easily have satisfied most of them with much less.

Mark Twain continued to write through his last decade but little of what he published during those years matched the quality and interest of his earlier writings. On his death in 1910, he left a large body of unfinished writings that would keep editors busy publishing new Mark Twain books far into the future. In addition to volumes with stories such as “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” and “Huck Finn & Tom Sawyer Among the Indians,” the posthumous volumes included collections of previously unpublished stories, sketches, essays, letters, speeches, notebooks, unfinished novels, and even plays. His autobiographical writings have been published in at least a half-dozen different versions, culminating with the Mark Twain Project’s publication of the first complete edition in three massive volumes in 2010–2015. It may not be an exaggeration to say that more words of his writing have been published for the first time since he died than were published during his lifetime.

Mark Twain’s Legacy

In 1906, four years before Mark Twain died, he observed that over the course of the preceding century, 220,000 books had been published in the United States, but “not a bathtub-full of them are still alive and marketable.” That statement may contain a modicum of exaggeration, but its essential point is as true now as it was in Mark Twain’s time: Few books outlive their authors, then or now. Indeed, this may have been especially true for nineteenth-century America novelists, most of whom are utterly forgotten today. There are exceptions, of course, and of these, Mark Twain may be the most outstanding example. In the year 2010—a full century after his 1910 death—not only were most of his books still in print, some—including Huckleberry Finn— had never gone out of print, even briefly, since their original publication. There may not be another American author of his time for whom the same can be said. That fact raises questions about what accounts for his enduring popularity and whether his popularity says anything about his greatness as a writer.

A simple but incomplete answer to the question of why Mark Twain’s popularity has endured is that at least three of his books have entered the realm of acknowledged classics. The title characters and basic story lines of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and The Prince and the Pauper (1881) have become so deeply ingrained in American culture that many people who know these titles may not even know that it was Mark Twain who wrote them—just as they may know almost everything but the names of the authors of such other famous books as Pinocchio, Ben-Hur, or The Swiss Family Robinson. Indeed, when the Disney Company used “The Prince and the Pauper” as the title for an animated Mickey Mouse film in 1990, it did not even bother to include Mark Twain’s name in the film’s credits—an omission that seemed to imply that Mark Twain’s story has passed beyond the realm of a mere classic to become a timeless and anonymously created fairy tale. This sort of popularity, however, does not account for why a book such as Huckleberry Finn is assigned reading in thousands of high school and college classes every year and is the subject of a seemingly endless outpouring of scholarly theses, articles, books … and controversy.

Among scholars, the difference between literary works worthy of study and those that are not lies in the matter of their “interpretability”—or, in simpler language, how much can be read into them. Whereas Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) lends itself to nearly endless interpretations of its themes, symbols, and multiple levels, an intelligent, witty, beautifully crafted, and immensely entertaining novel may reveal all it has to say on its first reading, leaving nothing more to be interpreted. One of the things that makes Mark Twain a truly great writer is that many of his books—especially Huckleberry Finn—can be read both as high entertainment and as deep works of almost limitless interpretability—as the essays within the present volume demonstrate.

Mark Twain’s writings are carefully read, reread, analyzed, reanalyzed, interpreted, and reinterpreted because they continue to have something fresh to say to each new generation. In an essay comparing Mark Twain to Ambrose Bierce in Critical Insights: Mark Twain, the distinguished scholar Lawrence I. Berkove called Mark Twain “an unaccountable literary genius, a giant for the ages” (Berkove 132). Berkove’s description is apt, as it reflects the growing view that Mark Twain has depths that can never fully be plumbed, that we can go on forever reading and studying him and never fully explain his work. Many who study Mark Twain feel momentarily satisfied when they seem to have answered a question about him, only to find new questions emerging to take its place. Meanwhile, every year sees the publication of perhaps a half dozen new books and even more new articles about him.

If all this makes studying Mark Twain sound like it should be wearing, it is not. In fact, it is exactly the opposite. Most people who have spent years reading and studying Mark Twain—both scholars and “buffs”—relish sharing in the thrill of making new discoveries. Enough new research is being done to convene international conferences every two years—alternating between Elmira, New York, and Hannibal, Missouri. These conferences are always well attended, and the enthusiasm participants bring generates palpable excitement.

Some years ago, when Shelley Fisher Fishkin, one of the leading scholars in the field, was working on Lighting Out for the Territory, she wondered why she never grew bored with Mark Twain and hit on a little epiphany: We cannot get bored with the man, she suggested, because he connects with everything. Like Mark Twain’s own bathtub anecdote, her remark may contain a touch of exaggeration, but it also expresses an important truth. Mark Twain actually does connect with almost everything. During his nearly seventy-five years on this planet, he lived through one of the greatest periods of social, political, and technological change in human history. When he was born in 1835, fewer than thirteen million Americans were living in the nation’s twenty-four states. By the time he died, in 1910, the country had grown to more than ninety-two million people living in forty-six states, and the percentage of them living in cities had more than doubled. Moreover, at the time of his birth, slavery was flourishing in the southern states, steam-powered trains and vessels were still in rudimentary stages of development, medical practices had scarcely advanced beyond those of the Middle Ages, and inventions such as photography, telegraphy, and even typewriters still lay in the future. By the end of his life, American slavery had long since been abolished. Tens of thousands of miles of railroad lines were moving high-speed trains around the country, and gas-powered automobiles were beginning to appear everywhere, iron-hulled steamships were plying the world’s seas, and airplanes were taking to the skies. Photography had advanced so far that color film was already being used and motion pictures were being made. The telegraph was carrying messages almost everywhere in the world, and telephonic and radio communication was rapidly spreading. Thanks to a new understanding of germs and other developments, medicine was moving into the modern age.

Mark Twain himself was quick to adopt new technologies, such as typewriters, electrical lighting, modern plumbing, and telephones. He was one of the first people to be photographed in color, and he appears in a brief Thomas A. Edison movie that can be seen on YouTube.

Mark Twain was certainly not the only American to live through all those and other changes, but he was unusual in closely observing and writing about most of them. He was also unusual for his time in being exceptionally well traveled from a relatively young age. He lived for at least a few months in almost every region of the present United States. He also crossed the Atlantic Ocean twenty-five times, visited every inhabited continent, and spent nearly twelve years living in other countries. During his widespread travels, he met many of the world’s leading cultural, political, and scientific figures and had close relationships with more than a few of them. As a consequence, he has attracted almost as much attention from biographers as he has from literary scholars.

Mark Twain’s interests were so broad and diverse that is difficult to find a subject on which his writings do not touch. He had a rich imagination and incredibly inventive mind that allowed him to foresee future technologies and political and social developments. He left a large body of speculative fictional writings unpublished when he died. Had he finished and published more of those works, he might now rank alongside Jules Verne and H. G. Wells as a pioneer of science fiction.

For all those reasons and more, suggesting that Mark Twain connects with everything may not be as great an exaggeration as it first appears to be. There are, however, other dimensions to Mark Twain that keep readers and scholars returning to him. One of the most important—and perhaps most obvious—is his remarkable ability to make people laugh. Whatever else one thinks about his writing, he very frequently is funny and often in unexpected ways. Indeed, an ironic effect of his humor was that he enjoyed such a great reputation as a humorist during his lifetime that it got in the way of critics appreciating the profundity and his work. It would not be until decades after he died that the full greatness of his writing began to be appreciated.

Is Mark Twain the greatest writer America has yet produced? And is Adventures of Huckleberry Finn the great American novel? Many people would answer both questions in the affirmative, but perhaps such questions need not even be asked. Leaving aside the matter of whether it is even possible to answer such questions, it should be enough to say that Mark Twain is a great writer and that Huckleberry Finn is a great book. Proof in support of this assertion lies in the fact that fully a century after his death, people continue to read his books avidly—even when they are not assigned in schools—and scholars continue to offer new and often exciting interpretations of his life and work—as the essays in the present volume amply demonstrate.

Works Cited