William Faulkner called Mark Twain “the first truly American writer”; Eugene O'Neill dubbed him “the true father of American literature.” Charles Darwin kept “Innocents Abroad” on his bedside table, within easy reach when he wanted to clear his mind and relax at bedtime. “The Gilded Age” gave an entire era its name. Joseph Conrad often thought of “Life on the Mississippi” when he commanded a steamer on the Congo. Friedrich Nietzsche admired “Tom Sawyer”. Lu Xun was so entranced by “Eve's Diary” that he had it translated into Chinese. Ernest Hemingway claimed “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn',” while his fellow Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe cited “Huck” as the book that spoke so powerfully to his condition in war-torn Japan that it inspired him to write his first novel. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the phrase “New Deal” from “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court”, a book which led science fiction giant Isaac Asimov to credit Twain (along with Jules Verne) with having invented time travel. Twain has been called the American Cervantes, our Homer, our Tolstoy, our Shakespeare, our Rabelais. From the breezy slang and deadpan humor that peppered his earliest comic sketches to the unmistakably American characters who populated his fiction, Twain's writings introduced readers around the world to American personalities speaking in distinctively American cadences. “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” was America's literary Declaration of Independence, a book no Englishman could have written - a book that expanded the democratic possibilities of what a modern novel could do and what it could be. Time and time again, Twain defied readers' expectations, forging unforgettable narratives from materials that had previously not been the stuff of literature. Humane, sardonic, compassionate, impatient, hilarious, appalling, keenly observant and complex, Twain inspired great writers in the 20th century to become the writers they became. Born in 1835 in the village of Florida, Missouri, Sam Clemens (who would take the name “Mark Twain” in 1863) spent his boyhood in the town of Hannibal, Missouri. In 1847, when his father died, 12-year-old Sam ended his formal schooling and became a printer's apprentice in a local newspaper office, later working as a journeyman printer in St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Washington and elsewhere. He spent two years learning the river and becoming a riverboat pilot, but his career on the river was ended by the Civil War. After spending two weeks in a ragtag unit of the Missouri State Guard that was sympathetic to the Confederacy, he set out for the Nevada Territory with his brother and tried to strike it rich mining silver. Although he failed as a prospector, he succeeded as a journalist. He courted Olivia Langdon of Elmira, New York, and published “Innocents Abroad” in 1869, to great popular acclaim. He married, started a family, and began writing the books for which he is best known today while living in the family mansion he built in Hartford, Connecticut. He died in 1910. A child of slaveholders, Twain grew up to write a book that many view as the most profoundly anti-racist novel by an American that clearly spoke from his own experience. Troubled by his own failure to question the unjust status quo during his Hannibal childhood, Twain became a compelling critic of people's ready acceptance of what he called “the lie of silent assertion” - the “silent assertion that nothing is going on which fair and intelligent men are aware of and are engaged by their duty to try to stop.”
