Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens grew up on the banks of the Mississippi, a barefoot boy in a sleepy river town who would one day take his pen name from a riverboatman's cry — 'mark twain,' the call that meant the water ran deep enough to pass safely. He was a printer, a steamboat pilot, a failed silver miner, and a newspaperman before he became the writer who taught America how to laugh at itself.

With Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn he caught a whole country in amber — its mischief, its cruelty, its rivers and its conscience. Beneath the jokes ran a moral seriousness as deep as the channel he once steered; Huck Finn's choice to befriend a runaway slave rather than betray him remains one of the bravest moments in American letters. Twain hated cant, pomposity, and injustice, and he aimed his wit at all three.

He outlived his fortune and most of those he loved, and his late writing turned dark and searching. Yet the world remembers the twinkle more than the grief. We honor him as the man who proved that humor is not the opposite of truth but one of its sharpest tools — and that a good laugh, aimed well, can do the work of a sermon.