“The artist is a person who has invented an artist.”

-Harold Rosenberg

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, is one of the great linchpins of American letters: he ties the moral and literary sentiments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries together. Twain, in fact, is derived from the Old English word meaning two. In Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “The Ballad of East and West,” the word was immortalized in the phrase, “Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet…”

Twain was a perfect name for an alias, a pen name, an alter ego, a double; and in the year 1863, Samuel Langhorne Clemens would take up the name Mark Twain and set it in print in the pages of the Enterprize.

Widely considered the “Father of American Literature,” Twain was an internationally known journalist, lecturer, and novelist. Bornin Missouri in 1835, his childhood experience with the cruelty of the Antebellum South greatly affected much of his later writing. Twain’s father, John Clemens, died of pneumonia in 1847, leading Twain to take on several odd jobs at a young age, including typesetting at his older brother’s newspaper. After two decades of itinerant laboring, Twain became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River. However, in 1861, the Civil War’s restriction of river traffic led Twain to leave the profession. He volunteered for a Confederate unit for two short weeks before deserting and moving west to the Nevada Territory with his brother, where Twain began to view himself as a “literary person” and used the pen name “Mark Twain” for the first time in letters and articles.

Twain’s first large-scale literary success was the 1865 publication of his short story “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” which was printed and reprinted across the country. In 1869, he published The Innocents Abroad, which remains one of the most successful travel narratives of American Literature. However, Twain is best known for his novels Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Tom Sawyer, continues to appeal to audiences both young and old through its amusing and nostalgic depictions of a boy growing up along the Mississippi River. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn features a heavier moral dilemma seen through Huck’s commitment to helping a runaway slave, highlighting both the shameful legacy of slavery, as well as the resultant pattern of racial descrimination and violence. Huckleberry Finn is unique in that it features much of the vernacular of the different classes of people living along the Mississippi River at the time, and Twain was the first writer to incorporate this language into American literature.

Throughout his career, Mark Twain published twenty-eight books, in addition to many short stories, essays, and lectures. During his lifetime, he experienced the transformation of American society, including industrialization, the end of slavery, and westward expansion, and much of his writing sheds light on the social significance of these events. Widely considered to be America’s first celebrity, Twain succeeded in establishing an international reputation, which is evident in the large crowds he drew around the world in his 1895-1896 lecture tour. Twenty-five years after Twain’s death, Hemingway wrote in The Greens Hills of Africa (1935), “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn,” which is evidence of Twain’s lasting impact on American culture and art.