American writer, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30th 1835 in Hannibal, Missouri. He has been called "the largest literary personality that America has produced". His father was stern and humourless; his mother pious and quick-witted. Like Abraham Lincoln, Twain was a product of the American frontier.
Hannibal sits on the banks of the Mississippi river, which in the pre-railroad era was perhaps America's most important commercial artery. The cry "mark twain" from a boatman meant the river was of safely navigable depth. He worked as a steamboat pilot and printer's devil before becoming a writer.
Twain wrote "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn", "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", among many other stories, articles and speeches. He spent his most productive summers writing in an octagonal study on his wife's family's farm in Elmira, New York. Ernest Hemingway claimed that "all modern American literature comes" from "Huckleberry Finn". The novel is now banned from most American secondary schools because of its repetitive use of the n-word, though it was a profoundly anti-racist work.
The Missouri of Twain's youth was a slave state; his father owned and rented people. Yet Twain became an ardent opponent not just of slavery but of racial discrimination in almost any form, and supported women's suffrage long before it was popular. William Dean Howells, his editor at the Atlantic, called him "the most desouthernised southerner I ever met."
Twain's biting wit, oratorical and self-promotional skills made him a star, as beloved by the crowds who packed into halls to watch him speak as by presidents and the literati. Ron Chernow argues that Twain "fairly invented our celebrity culture". A 1,200-page biography by Mr Chernow was published in 2025.
Sources: The Economist, May 15th 2025
You possess a mind not merely twisted, but actually sprained.