As one of America’s first and foremost realists and humorists, Mark Twain, usually wrote about his own personal experiences and things he knew about from firsthand experience. # Two of his best-known novels show this trait, in his Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain immortalized the sleepy little town of Hannibal, Missouri (the fictional St. Petersburg), as well as the steamboats which passed through it daily, in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The various characters are based on types which Twain encountered both in his hometown and while working as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River, and even though A Connecticut Yankee is not based on personal experience Twain uses many of the same techniques that he used in his Prince and the Pauper. In that novel, for example, two young boys gradually lose their innocence; in A Connecticut Yankee, Hank Morgan wakes up in a land of innocence-Camelot. It was the Mississippi River and the values of the people who lived along its length that made Twain one of America’s best and favorite storytellers. The humor which he found there, along with its way of life, has continued to fascinate readers and to embody an almost mythic sense of what it meant to be a young American in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Samuel Clemens was considered the father of modern American literature. He was an author, humorist, and lecturer. His insight into human nature, his humor, and his use of everyday American language have made his novels and stories among the best in American literature. Samuel L. Clemens was born on Nov. 30, 1835 in Florida Mo., a village on the Mississippi River. Much of what happened there was to go into the books he was going to write. The Mississippi was a lifelong fascination for him. Samuel later to...
