Mark Twain

Samuel Clemens grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, a river town that would later become the setting for the most important novels in American literature. He worked as a printer, a riverboat pilot, a silver miner, and a journalist before he became Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — a story about a white boy and a Black man floating down the Mississippi toward freedom — is still the most honest book ever written about America’s original sin. It was funny, vulgar, tender, and radical. They banned it then and they ban it now, which tells you it’s still working. Twain was the country’s first celebrity intellectual — he toured the world giving lectures, smoked 40 cigars a day, and went spectacularly bankrupt investing in a typesetting machine. He lost his wife and two of his three daughters. The humor darkened. By the end, his writing was furious — anti-imperialist, anti-church, anti-everything that made powerful people comfortable. He was born when Halley’s Comet appeared and died when it returned, 74 years later. He predicted that too.