Mark Twain | 1835-1910 The book which Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner would describe as the beginning of modern American fiction almost never saw the light of day. Mark Twain (born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Missouri) nearly burned the manuscript of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn out of frustration with it. Twain labored for seven years over this fundamental American story of "lighting out." Many critics have identified in Huck Finn the same boys' adventure themes that drive the work of British writers including Robert Louis Stevenson and H. Rider Haggard. But in Huck Finn, these stories for boys coexist with an adult recognition of both American failings and American nobility. Of Twain's major works, only one -- The Prince and the Pauper (1882) -- was intended for children. Even The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), with its celebration of summer life along the Mississippi, was originally meant for adults. Twain's intentions, of course, do not count for much: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court found favor with younger readers, and Tom Sawyer, with its pranks, low diction, and resistance to authority, was embraced by American children enthusiastically, much to the consternation of the adults who found in Tom and Huck poor role models for their young charges. In Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Life on the Mississippi (expanded in 1883 from "Old Times on the Mississippi," which had appeared in installments in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875), Twain lays out the mythic images of America -- the frontier, independence, and, most importantly, boyhood -- that still resonate today in the national consciousness. Twain's voice is distinctive in the canon of great American literature, combining as it did a Western sensibility and a sophisticated wit, but these three works can be seen as representative, also, of an important trend in American fiction after the Civil War. Literature after the Civil War turned to "local color" accounts of the many and varied regions of the United States, perhaps a perverse assertion of individualism after the war's cementing of a single national identity. Twain's sharp ear for regional speech patterns and his journalistic eye for (literally) local color resulted in narratives that were, on the one hand, specific to life on the Mississippi but were, on the other, very much about the growing pains of a young nation.