"... Your surmise is correct, sharply and exactly so—that I confine myself to life with which I am familiar, when pretending to portray life." (Mark Twain in a letter to an unidentified person-1890)
Mark Twain was actually familiar with several lives—all of them exciting and vital—connected with great events in the history of this country.
He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, a tiny village of fewer than five hundred people in a land that was still predominantly pioneer country. Missouri had been a state for only eighteen years when Twain was born, and it was the farthest west of all the states. As a boy, Mark Twain knew the life of a small, rural town on the edge of a wilderness. Beyond Missouri stretched plains and mountains, forests and rivers, which were still largely unmapped and which still belonged, for the most part, to the Indians.
The great Mississippi River was a central element of Twain's boyhood. It linked the backwoods hamlet of Hannibal with the movement of goods and people of an expanding nation. The dream of every boy along the Mississippi was to become one day a pilot on one of the grand Mississippi steamboats, and this Mark Twain did become. He came to know the varied life of that great river at first-hand.
As the frontier moved westward Mark Twain moved westward with it. He lived the life of the mining towns of Nevada in their raw, wild, undisciplined days. He met legendary desperados and saw gunfights and murders. He went to California just a few years after the 49'ers and before the flush of gold boom times had faded.
Mark Twain the writer wrote about these things. But his life on the Mississippi was his fondest memory. Two of his best loved books Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn deal with this life.
In this book, Jean Rikhoff tells about the lives of Mark Twain and how they influenced his memorable books. This book is a vivid picture of America growing up and expanding, just as Mark Twain lived it.
—from the book
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