Born Samuel Clemens in 1835 — printer, river pilot, miner — Mark Twain made the plain, regional speech of ordinary Americans into literature. His masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), follows a poor white boy and Jim, an escaped enslaved man, down the Mississippi; widely read as a profound anti-slavery satire, it is also among the most challenged books in American schools. Often called the father of American literature, Twain's humor carried a blade. He turned bitterly anti-imperialist in his later years and died in 1910 under Halley's Comet.
He took his name from a river. "Mark twain" was the cry a leadsman sang out on a Mississippi steamboat when the water measured two fathoms deep, just safe enough to pass. Samuel Clemens had been one of those pilots before the Civil War shut the river down, and when he started signing his comic sketches he reached for that call from the wheelhouse. Under it he wrote the way Americans actually talked. Not the grand, borrowed English of the East Coast and Europe, but the slangy, funny, ungrammatical speech of rivermen and frontier towns. In one boy's journey down that same river, rafting with an escaped enslaved man named Jim, he produced what many call the first great American novel and one of the most argued-over books the country has ever taught. The plain speech that educated readers once dismissed as crude turned out to be the sound of American literature finding its own voice.