Mark Twain

In the Missouri town where Samuel Clemens grew up, his pen name is used to sell everything from books to T-shirts to sacks of concrete.

A new book reminds us that Mark Twain would absolutely hate winding up on approved reading lists. Like his most famous creation, Huck Finn, he took a dim view of civilization.

The 19th author and magazine editor William Dean Howells once wrote a novel that eerily anticipated the recent troubles at The New Republic.

Young writers besotted by the image of a swaggering, confident Twain should take heart: Underneath that white suit lurked an author as insecure and neurotic as those who idolize him.

In California, young newspaperman Sam Clemens fell in with Bret Harte and other self-styled Bohemians, and together they discovered the American voice.

A shirtless photo of Mark Twain has taken the Web by storm. From Faulkner to Hemingway, here are other writers who’ve gone topless.

The British travel writer was known for the classic The Road to Oxiana, but his earlier account from his younger days, Europe in the Looking-Glass, shows him coming into his own as an art critic and historian.