Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, and essayist. He has been praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced", with William
Twain in 1907
Samuel Clemens, age 15 holding metal type in a composing stick that spells out his first name. As a daguerreotype, whose creation involved no intermediate negative, the image is laterally reversed. Hence the type, which, in actuality, was backward, is readable, though Twain himself is flipped.
(From l. to r.) American Civil War correspondent and author George Alfred Townsend, Mark Twain and David Gray, editor of the rival Buffalo Courier
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a picaresque novel by American author Mark Twain that was first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. It is comm
Mark Twain
…with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature". Twain's novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel". He also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson…
2nd (1st US) edition book cover
Huckleberry Finn, as depicted by E. W. Kemble in the original 1884 edition of the book
Jim and Huck on their raft, by E. W. Kemble
In this scene illustrated by E. W. Kemble, Jim has given Huck up for dead and when he reappears thinks he must be a ghost.