Description
Book SynopsisMark Twain's real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He was born on 30 November 1835, in Florida, Missouri. Twain worked first as a printer and then as a pilot on Mississippi steamboats. The name Mark Twain is a phrase used on riverboats to indicate that the water is two fathoms deep. Twain later worked as a prospector, a journalist and a publisher.
Twain wrote many books but his most famous works are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). He is also well known as the author of The Prince and the Pauper (1882) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889).
Twain moved around a great deal during his life and lived in Europe for some years. He finally settled near Redding in Connecticut where he died on 21 April 1910.
Trade ReviewAll modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called
Huckleberry Finn...There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since -- Ernest Hemingway
The quintessential American novel * Guardian *
It is Huck who gives the book style. The River gives the book its form. But for the River, the book might be only a sequence of adventures with a happy ending. A river, a very big and powerful river, is the only natural force that can wholly determine the course of human peregrination.... Thus the River makes the book a great book... Mark Twain is a native, and the River God is his God -- T.S. Eliot
The invention of this language, with all its implications, gave a new dimension to our literature. It is a language capable of poetry -- Robert Penn Warren
Running all through the book is the sharpest satire on the ante-bellum estimate of the slave * San Francisco Chronicle *
