MARK TWAIN in The Reading Room at Kitchen Sink Dramas

The Reading Room

MARK TWAIN

(1835-1910)

Mark Twain was the penname of Samuel Langhoren Clemens, the American novelist and humorist, later given the title of ‘the father of American literature’ by William Faulkner. Twain grew up in Hannibal on the banks of the Mississippi, a town that would later become the fictional St. Petersburg in Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He worked as a printer, steamboat pilot and silver miner before developing a successful career as a travel journalist and lecturer. Huckleberry Finn was the novel that solidified Twain’s literary career, demonstrating his talent for combining wit, acute observation of the ‘ordinary’ American and exacting literary description with serious social criticism. Ernest Hemingway went so far as to declare of the book; “There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” Twain was an intensely political writer, outspoken in his abhorrence of racism and imperialism, but he also left a legacy of wonderful wisecracks, insults and aphorisms, including a personal favourite: ‘Be good and you will be lonesome.’