Samuel L. Clemens, who published as Mark Twain — American humorist, novelist, lecturer, and the figure Hemingway identified when he said that all modern American literature comes from one book, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi River in the last decades of American slavery, apprenticed as a printer, piloted riverboats, prospected in Nevada, and invented himself in San Francisco and Virginia City as the pseudonymous wry Western correspondent whose voice — colloquial, accurate, merciless with cant — opened the space in which American vernacular literature thereafter lived.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1884) are the central achievements. Huckleberry Finn, narrated in the voice of a barely literate white boy who floats down the Mississippi with a Black man named Jim who is fleeing slavery, is the book in which the American novel finds its democratic vernacular — and finds, in Huck's decision to "go to hell" rather than betray Jim to the slave-catchers, one of the most morally serious moments in 19th-century American fiction. The novel is also a sustained problem: Twain's Jim moves between dignified interiority and minstrel stereotype, the ending retreats into Tom Sawyer's cruel slapstick, and the book's continued presence on American school curricula has produced a sustained debate that is itself part of American intellectual history.
The late Twain is darker. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) is an anti-feudal satire that turns, at its end, into something close to horror. "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" (1901) and other writings of the 1890s and 1900s attack American imperial adventure in the Philippines and the Congo with a ferocity that cost him readers. The posthumous Letters from the Earth (1962) and The Mysterious Stranger fragments are essentially theological attacks on a God Twain considered a moral monster. He died embittered and bankrupt in 1910, having outlived his wife and two daughters; the public memory kept the smiling cigar-smoking humorist and forgot the anti-imperialist skeptic, which has been the work of subsequent generations to recover.