Huckleberry Finn is now read as a key to the very essence of the American imagination, a central document of our most primitive impulses. . . . Mark Twain was the quintessential American writer, quintessential because was more or less untutoreda natural, as Wright Morris puts it, who learned to write the way a river pilot learns the feel of a channel. Norman Podhoretz, New York Times, 1959 Norman Podhoretz (New York Times 1959) "The best book weve had There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." Ernest Hemingway "Truly an American odyssey. . . . It need not be stressed that Mark Twain re-created a full sense of life on the Mississippi. This is undisputed. He wrote with ease and buoyancy; there is humor, sensibility and beauty in his style. But there is real penetration, too. He evokes an entire epoch, which takes on organic shape, form, solidarity, depth." The New York Times

Mark Twain, who was born Samuel L. Clemens in Missouri in 1835, wrote some of the most enduring works of literature in the English language, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc was his last completed bookand, by his own estimate, his best. Its acquisition by Harper & Brothers allowed Twain to stave off bankruptcy. He died in 1910.