“They came back to camp wonderfully refreshed, glad-hearted, and ravenous; and they soon had the campfire blazing up again…While Joe was slicing bacon for breakfast, Tom and Huck asked him to hold on a minute; they stepped to a promising nook in the river-bank and threw in their lines; almost immediately they had reward.”

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1875

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) wrote and published under the name Mark Twain throughout his career, though it’s hard to say when that career started, or how much he wrote, because he wrote so much! Publishing articles and stories in magazines, journals, and newspapers, as well both novels and non-fictional books, Twain was a well-known name in the United States and beyond for most of his life. In fact, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer wasn’t very financially successful when it was first printed in the US, not because people didn’t want to read it, but because they wanted to read it so much that they managed to get pirated copies from Canada months earlier.

Small town setting, one room schoolhouse - Pleasant Valley