Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, one of the central figures of American literature and one of the sharpest comic voices in the English language. Born in Missouri in 1835, Twain worked as a printer, riverboat pilot, journalist, lecturer, and author, drawing from American speech, travel, politics, frontier life, and the contradictions of the nation around him. His major works include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.Twain's fiction is funny because it is exact, and dangerous because the joke usually has teeth. He wrote about childhood, race, class, technology, empire, religion, greed, sentimentality, and the foolishness of human certainty with a voice that could be playful one moment and merciless the next. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, he brought that comic intelligence to time travel and Arthurian legend, creating one of the great speculative satires of modern literature.
