Hannibal: Home of “America’s Greatest Humorist”

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was born in the tiny village of Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835. He’s best known, of course, as the author of the classic American novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But Clemens considered himself a journalist first. At age 15, he started working as a typesetter and writing articles and humorous sketches for his brother Orion’s newspaper, the Hannibal Journal.

By age 18, Clemens left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, Cincinnati and St. Louis. Clemens was still uncertain what he wanted to do with his life and worked a stint as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River until the Civil War almost ended commerce on the river. Years later, the river venture led to his book Life on the Mississippi. The riverboat experience also led him to adopt his pen name, Mark Twain, meaning a measured river depth of two fathoms or 12 feet.

Twain was reared in Missouri, a slave state at the time, and he briefly enlisted in a Confederate unit in 1861. The unit was soon disbanded, so he headed west to be with Orion, who had become secretary of the new territorial government in the Nevada territory. Twain landed a job as a silver miner but failed to find riches and went to work as
a journalist at the Territorial Enterprise of Virginia City, Nevada. He first used the Mark Twain pen name on Feb. 3, 1863, on a humorous travel account in the Enterprise. After a short spell in San Francisco, also as a journalist, Twain’s big breakthrough as a writer came in 1865 when The Saturday Press of New York published “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” a humorous tale that brought him national acclaim and celebrity status.

In 1865, he traveled to Hawaii as a reporter for the Sacramento Union. The next year, two newspapers, including the New York Tribune, financed a trip for him to visit Europe and the Middle East. There, a guide took him to what was described as the tomb of Adam. Twain wrote, “How touching it was, here in a land of strangers, far away from home . . . to discover the grave of a blood relation.”

From 1869–1871, Twain lived in Buffalo, New York, where he worked as a writer and editor of the Buffalo Express, of which he was part-owner. He married in 1870, and in 1873, he moved his family to Hartford, Connecticut, where they would live for 17 years. There, and at the summer home of his sister-in-law in Elmira, New York, he wrote most of his great novels. He died April 10, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut, and is buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira.

Make a visit to the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum in Hannibal. In 1935, famed artist Norman Rockwell was commissioned by Heritage Press to illustrate special editions of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He went to Hannibal to make preliminary sketches, then returned to his studio in New Rochelle, New York, to paint them.

Following the publication of Tom Sawyer, the illustrations for that book were loaned to the Hannibal museum. Rockwell borrowed them back in 1940 for a traveling exhibition of his works. Then, in 1941, the Tom Sawyer illustrations, accompanied for the first time by those for Huckleberry Finn, were sent back to the museum. They have been on display there ever since. In 1972, Rockwell formally donated the paintings to the museum.

Nearby is Mark Twain Cave, which inspired The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. An hour-long tour takes visitors through Missouri’s oldest show cave. A statue of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn presides over the north end of Main Street in Hannibal.

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This article is printed in the Missouri Newspaper Heritage Trail. Order one for free (you only pay shipping) here.