Mark Twain

Of all the writers in our country, Mark Twain is arguably the most popular and widely read. His most well-known writings are brought together in this single volume. Tom Sawyer is a novel whose nostalgia is so strong that it dissolves the tensions and perplexities that assert themselves in the later works, according to its author. Tom Sawyer "is simply a hymn put into prose form to give it a worldly air." Twain started writing Huckleberry Finn the same year Tom Sawyer was released, but it took him several more years to finish. Twain visited his childhood home in Hannibal, Missouri, during this tumultuous time, on a pilgrimage that ultimately inspired him to write Life on the Mississippi.