Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 April 21, 1910),well known by his pen nameMark Twain, was an American author and humorist. Twain is noted for his novels Adventures ofHuckleberry Finn (1884), which has been called“the Great American Novel“, and The Adventuresof Tom Sawyer (1876). He is extensively quoted. Twain was a friend to presidents, artists,industrialists, and European royalty.Twain was very popular, and his keen wit and incisive satire earned praise from critics and peers.Upon his death he was lauded as the “greatest American humorist of his age“, and William Faulknercalled Twain “the father of American literature“.Twain began his career writing light, humorous verse, but evolved into a chronicler of the vanities,hypocrisies and murderous acts of mankind. At mid-career, with Huckleberry Finn, he combinedrich humor, sturdy narrative and social criticism. Twain was a master at rendering colloquial speechand helped to create and popularize a distinctive American literature built on American themes andlanguage. Many of Twains works have been suppressed at times for various reasons. Adventuresof Huckleberry Finn has been repeatedly restricted in American high schools, not least for itsfrequent use of the word “nigger“, which was in common usage in the pre-Civil War period inwhich the novel was set.A complete bibliography of his works is nearly impossible to compile because of the vast number ofpieces written by Twain (often in obscure newspapers) and his use of several different pen names.Additionally, a large portion of his speeches and lectures have been lost or were not written down;thus, the collection of Twains works is an ongoing process.Researchers rediscovered publishedmaterial by Twain as recently as 1995.Early journalism and traveloguesCabin in which Twain wrote Jumping Frog of Calaveras, located on Jackass Hill in TuolumneCounty. Historical marker and interior view available.Twains first important work, “The CelebratedJumping Frog of Calaveras County“, was first published in the New York Saturday Press onNovember 18, 1865. The only reason it was published there was that his story arrived too late tobe included in a book Artemus Ward was compiling featuring sketches of the wild American West.After this burst of popularity, Twain was commissioned by the Sacramento Union to writelettersabout his travel experiences for publication in the newspaper, his first of which was to ride thesteamer Ajax in its maiden voyage to Hawaii, referred to at the time as the Sandwich Islands. Thesehumorous letters proved the genesis to his work with the San Francisco Alta California newspaper,which designated him a traveling correspondent for a trip from San Francisco to New York Cityvia the Panama isthmus. All the while, Twain waswriting letters meant for publishing back and forth,chronicling his experiences with his burlesque humor. On June 8, 1867, Twain set sail on thepleasure cruiser Quaker City for five months. This trip resultedin The Innocents Abroad or The NewPilgrims Progress.This book is a record of a pleasure trip. If it were a record of a solemn scientific expedition it wouldhave about it the gravity, that profundity, and that impressive incomprehensibility which are soproper to works of that kind, and withal so attractive. Yet not withstanding it is only a record of apicnic, it has a purpose, which is, to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europeand the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled inthose countries before him. I make small pretenseof showing anyone how he ought to look atobjects of interest beyond the sea other books do that, and therefore, even if I were competentto do it, there is no need.In 1872, Twain published a second piece of travel literature, Roughing It, as a semi-sequel toInnocents. Roughing It is a semi-autobiographical account of Twains journey to Nevada and hissubsequent life in the American West. The book lampoons American and Western society in thesame way that Innocents critiqued the various countries of Europe and the Middle East. Twainsnext work kept Roughing Its focus on American society but focused more on the events of theday. Entitled The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, it was not a travel piece, as his previous two bookshad been, and it was his first attempt at writing a novel. The book is also notable because it isTwains only collaboration; it was written with his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner.Twains next two works drew on his experiences on the Mississippi River. Old Times on theMississippi, a series of sketches published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875, featured Twainsdisillusionment with Romanticism. Old Times eventually became the starting point for Life on theMississippi.Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry FinnTwains next major publication was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which drew on his youth inHannibal. Tom Sawyer was modeled on Twain as a child, with traces of two schoolmates, Joh