Samuel Lang­horne Clemens (1835–1910) was of course the great Amer­i­can writer and humourist bet­ter known by the pseu­do­nym Mark Twain, and laud­ed as the father of Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture. His nov­els include The Adven­tures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adven­tures of Huck­le­ber­ry Finn (1884) as well as A Con­necti­cut Yan­kee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and Pud­d’n­head Wil­son (1894). The lat­ter nov­el I had on my book­shelf as a boy although I must admit I don’t remem­ber read­ing it; Adven­tures of Huck­le­ber­ry Finn, on the oth­er hand, was a sta­ple of my gen­er­a­tion that every­one read.

Clemens used a litany of pen names: before “Mark Twain” he had writ­ten as “Thomas Jef­fer­son Snod­grass”, “Sieur Louis de Con­te”, “John Snook” and even just “Josh”. There are a num­ber of com­pet­ing the­o­ries about the pseu­do­nym he con­clu­sive­ly decid­ed to adopt, my favourite being the river­boat call from his days work­ing on steam­boats: “by the mark, twain” (refer­ring to sound­ing a depth of two fath­oms, which was just safe enough for a steam­boat trav­el­ling down the Mis­sis­sip­pi). How­ev­er, anoth­er the­o­ry talks about his keep­ing a reg­u­lar tab open at his local saloon and call­ing the bar­tender to “mark twain” on the black­board, and I get the impres­sion that he enjoyed the spec­u­la­tion and nev­er con­clu­sive­ly con­firmed one or the oth­er.

He was raised in Han­ni­bal, Mis­souri, which lat­er pro­vid­ed the set­ting for both Tom Sawyer and Huck­le­ber­ry Finn. In his ear­ly years he worked as a print­er and type­set­ter, and then, as men­tioned, a river­boat pilot on the Mis­sis­sip­pi Riv­er, before head­ing west to join his broth­er Ori­on in Neva­da to spec­u­late unsuc­cess­ful­ly in var­i­ous min­ing enter­pris­es. Final­ly, he turned to jour­nal­ism and writ­ing which soon won him suc­cess and praise from his crit­ics and peers, and led him to his true voca­tion.

Adven­tures of Huck­le­ber­ry Finn is writ­ten through­out in ver­nac­u­lar Eng­lish and told in the first per­son by Huck­le­ber­ry “Huck” Finn. The book comes across as an authen­tic por­tray­al of boy­hood and it is awash with colour­ful descrip­tions of peo­ple and places along the Mis­sis­sip­pi Riv­er. Set in a South­ern ante­bel­lum soci­ety marked by the preva­lent prac­tice of slav­ery and its asso­ci­at­ed soci­etal norms, it often makes for uncom­fort­able read­ing, but at the same time it is a scathing satire against the entrenched atti­tudes of those days. The nov­el explores themes of race and iden­ti­ty long before that was a phrase, but also what it means to be free and civilised in the chang­ing land­scape of Amer­i­ca.