American · 1835–1910
Mark Twain invented American literature. Born Samuel Clemens in Missouri, he worked as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi, a printer, a miner in Nevada, and a journalist in San Francisco before becoming the most famous writer in the country. His pen name came from the riverboat term for safe water. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer established his comic genius; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—which Hemingway claimed as the source of all modern American writing—combined vernacular voice with moral seriousness in ways no American had managed before. Twain made comedy into high art and high art into comedy. His humor darkened over the years: financial disaster, the deaths of his wife and daughters, and his observations of imperialism and human cruelty produced increasingly bitter late work. He lectured around the world, became a celebrity in white suits, and befriended industrialists while attacking them in print. Twain voice—irreverent, democratic, American—created the template for American prose style. His influence on subsequent writers, from Hemingway to Vonnegut, remains incalculable.