Mark Twain

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), a Mississippi steamboat pilot before he was a writer. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is told entirely in the voice of an uneducated boy, and its moral climax works precisely because Huck never reasons his way to the right conclusion — he decides he would rather be damned than betray his friend, and concludes that this makes him wicked. Twain is also among the most misattributed writers in English; a large share of the wit credited to him online has no source in anything he wrote. Quotes here are cited by chapter.