But it was the Mississippi River and the values of the people living along its shores that have made Twain one of America’s best and favorite storytellers. The humor that he found among the small one-horse towns, along with the culture of the Mississippi, has continued to fascinate readers and to embody an almost mythic sense of what it meant to be a young American in the latter part of the nineteenth century.
In 1876, Twain captured these elements in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Despite its contemporary reception, Tom Sawyer’s publication was overshadowed by the deaths of George Custer and his calvary at Little Big Horn. But the book’s popularity would grow throughout Twain’s lifetime, and by the time of his death, it was his best-selling novel. Twain’s most controversial work, however, was to come nine years later. In 1885, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published among much publicity and fanfare. Huck Finn ensured Twain’s place among the literary giants, and the work would prove to be Twain’s most studied and critically acclaimed novel.
