Twain's Mississippi
1885 AD
1885 1885
91.25W39.40N
LIT

HANNIBAL, MISSOURI
	A red-haired boy named Sam Clemens stood on the deck of a ferryboat in the Mississippi River when his hat blew off.  So he jumped into the stormy river after it.  By the time he had swum two or three miles and retrieved it, the entire town of Hannibal, Missouri, had gathered on the wharf to look at where Sam was last seen.
	At least this was the story he wrote to a friend many years later.  But by that time Clemens was well-known for writing true stories with a lot of imagination in them and imaginary stories with a lot of truth in them.
	Every author writes best about what he knows best, and Samuel Langhorne Clemens was no exception. His three stories about life along the great river -- "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (1876); "Life on the Mississippi" (1883); and his masterpiece, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1885) -- are still his most widely read books.
	They were based on his memories of growing up in a sleepy little river town when his greatest ambition was to become the pilot of a steamboat.  Clemens even took his pen name from Mississippi River life. "Mark Twain" was a river term that indicated the water was deep enough for large boats. It means two fathoms, or twelve feet.
	In "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" Twain brought to life the imaginary town of St. Petersburg, Missouri, which was a lot like his home town of Hannibal, but nicer.  The character Tom Sawyer is a mix of Twain himself and a few other boys he knew while growing up.  "Huckleberry Finn" is about the adventures of a friend of Tom's.  Huck is the 13-year-old son of the town drunkard who runs away to escape his father's cruelty and the efforts of some good women of the town to civilize him.
	There were many adventure stories written before this book, but "Huckleberry Finn" was unique.  In it, Mark Twain allowed Huck to tell his story in his own language and from his own point of view.  Because Huck's rough language seemed vulgar, some critics in Twain's day called the book trash, but today it is considered an American masterpiece that introduced a new way of writing.
	Twain lived life as one long adventure.  He roamed the world and made his living as a Mississippi steamboat pilot, Civil War soldier, Western miner, reporter-at-large, travel writer, lecturer, editor, inventor, and publisher.  Yet he never met anyone, he said, whom he had not met before on the Mississippi River.