Mark twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the town of Florida, Missouri, in 1835. When he was four years old, his family moved to Hannibal, a town on the Mississippi River much like the towns depicted in his two most famous novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Clemens spent his young life in a fairly affluent family that owned a number of household slaves. The death of Clemens's father …showed first 75 words of 984 total…

…showed last 75 words of 984 total…wrote made his use of the word insignificant--and, indeed, part of the realism he wanted to create--offers little solace to some modern readers. Ultimately, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has proved significant not only as a novel that explores the racial and moral world of its time but also, through the controversies that continue to surround it, as an artifact of those same moral and racial tensions as they have evolved to the present day.