America's home town: fiction, Mark Twain, and the re-creation of Hannibal, Missouri

Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, is one of America's best known novelists. He wrote what many literary critics consider the first 'Great American Novel', The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in 1884. This book and his earlier novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), are based partly on his boyhood experiences living on the Mississippi River and in the town of Hannibal, Missouri. While Twain is best known as a humorist who pointed out satirical situations in everyday life, by the late nineteenth century he wrote extensively about social justice issues, making explicit commentaries on imperialism, labour, and racism. After Twain's death in 1910 the citizens of Hannibal worked diligently to strengthen the connection between Mark Twain and Hannibal in order to make Mark Twain and their city part of the national public memory despite him living there only a portion of his 75 years.