Mark Twain and Hannibal, The River, the Boy, and the Books That Made America

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November thirtieth, eighteen thirty-five, in the village of Florida, Missouri, a town of one hundred inhabitants whose population, Clemens later joked, rose by one percent the day he arrived. His family moved to Hannibal, on the west bank of the Mississippi, when he was four years old. He would spend the next thirteen years there, watching the river.

Hannibal in the eighteen forties and fifties was a busy river port, a town of perhaps three thousand people where enslaved men and women unloaded cargo and where the steamboats arriving from Saint Louis or Memphis represented everything glamorous and distant about the world beyond Missouri's bluffs. Young Sam Clemens absorbed it all: the pilots who commanded the boats with effortless authority, the boys who swam and fished and built rafts on the river's edge, the summer heat, the caves in the limestone hills, the seasonal floods, the mixture of gentility and violence that characterized a border-state river town in the years before the Civil War. He left at seventeen and did not come back except to visit.

He worked as a printer, a riverboat pilot, a Nevada territory journalist, and eventually a writer. He took the pen name Mark Twain in eighteen sixty-three, borrowing the leadsman's call for two fathoms of water, safe depth for a steamboat. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in eighteen eighty-four, is set on the Mississippi River and draws directly on the geography and social texture of Hannibal and its surroundings.

Hemingway wrote in nineteen thirty-five that all modern American literature comes from it. That is probably an overstatement, but it is the kind of overstatement that points at something true. Twain used the river and the boy and the slave Jim to write about freedom, hypocrisy, race, and moral cowardice in a country that preferred to think of itself as innocent.

The river carries all of it still.