The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, Fiction, Classics

"Most people easily picture Twain's long white handlebar moustache and can practically hear his riverman's drawl. Readers know he's Samuel Langhorne Clemens, and he's Mark Twain, and they've painted fences right alongside Tom Sawyer. Any number of young men have had crushes on Becky Thatcher, and any number of young women have laughed at Huck Finn's way of threading a needle. But none of Twain's eleven novels, nine travel books, and countless short stories and essays would have achieved their status had he not first paid attention himself: to everyone and everything that lived in his world."
-- from Amy Sterling Casil's Introduction

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835 - 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher and lecturer. Among his novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "The Great American Novel". Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks, he filed for protection from his creditors via bankruptcy, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no legal responsibility to do so.