William Faulkner called Mark Twain "the first truly American writer"; Eugene O'Neill dubbed him "the true father of American literature". Charles Darwin kept The Innocents Abroad on his bedside table, within easy reach when he wanted to clear his mind and relax at bedtime. The Gilded Age gave an entire era its name. Joseph Conrad often thought of Life on the Mississippi when he commanded a steamer on the Congo. Friedrich Nietzsche admired Tom Sawyer. Lu Xun was so entranced by Eve's Diary that he had it translated into Chinese. Ernest Hemingway claimed "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn," while his fellow Nobel laureate Kenzaburō Ōe cited Huck as the book that spoke so powerfully to his condition in war-torn Japan that it inspired him to write his first novel. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the phrase "new deal" from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, a book which led science fiction giant Isaac Asimov to credit Twain with having invented time travel. When José Martí read Yankee, he was so moved by Twain's depiction of "the vileness of those who would climb atop their fellow man, feed upon his misery, and drink from his misfortune" that he wanted to "set off for Hartford [Connecticut] to shake his hand."

Twain has been called the American Cervantes, Homer, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Rabelais. From the breezy slang and deadpan humor that peppered his earliest comic sketches to the unmistakably American characters who populated his fiction, Twain's writings introduced readers around the world to American personalities speaking in distinctively American cadences . The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was America's literary Declaration of Independence, a book no Englishman could have written—a book that expanded the democratic possibilities of what a modern novel could do and what it could be.

Twain helped define the rhythms of our prose and the contours of our moral map. He saw our best and our worst, our extravagant promise and our stunning failures, our comic foibles and our tragic flaws. He understood better than we did ourselves American dreams and aspirations, our potential for greatness and our potential for disaster. His fictions brilliantly illuminated the world in which he lived and the world we inherited, changing it—and us— in the process . He knew that our feet often danced to tunes that had somehow remained beyond our hearing; with perfect pitch he played them back to us.

His unerring sense of the right word and not its second cousin taught people to pay attention when he spoke, in person or in print. ("The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.")

Twain's quirky, ambitious, strikingly original fiction and nonfiction engaged some of the perennially thorny, messy challenges we are still grappling with today—such as the challenge of making sense of a nation founded on freedom by men who held slaves; or the puzzle of our continuing faith in technology in the face of our awareness of its destructive powers; or the problem of imperialism and the difficulties involved in getting rid of it. Indeed, it would be difficult to find an issue on the horizon today that Twain did not touch on somewhere in his work. Heredity versus environment? Animal rights? The boundaries of gender? The place of black voices in the cultural heritage of the United States? Twain was there. Satirist Dick Gregory once said that Twain "was so far ahead of his time that he shouldn't even be talked about on the same day as other people."

At the beginning of his career, Twain was lauded as a talented humorist. But the comic surface turned out to mask unexpected depths. ("Yes, you are right," Twain wrote a friend in 1902, "I am a moralist in disguise.") Time and time again, Twain defied readers’ expectations, forging unforgettable narratives from materials that had previously not been the stuff of literature. As William Dean Howells once put it, "He saunters out into the trim world of letters, and lounges across its neatly kept paths, and walks about on the grass at will , in spite of all the signs that have been put up from the beginning of literature, warning people of dangers and penalties for the slightest trespass ."

Humane, sardonic , compassionate, impatient, hilarious , appalling, keenly observant and complex, Twain inspired great writers in the 20th century to become the writers they became—not just in the U.S., but around the world. Writers marveled at the art Twain wrought from the speech of ordinary people—speech whose previous appearance in literature had most often been treated with ridicule. Jorge Luis Borges observed that in Huckleberry Finn "for the first time an American writer used the language of America without affectation." Twain taught American authors from Arthur Miller to Toni Morrison , and countless others important lessons about the craft of fiction. Some key figures in the visual arts, as well, found reading Mark Twain transformative. Cartoonist Chuck Jones, for example, who played a key role in developing such icons of American popular culture as Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, and Bugs Bunny, tracks these characters back to his early reading of Mark Twain's Roughing It.

Born in 1835 in the village of Florida, Missouri, Sam Clemens (who would take the name "Mark Twain" in 1863) spent his boyhood in the town of Hannibal, Missouri. In 1847, when his father died, 11-year-old Sam ended his formal schooling and became a printer's apprentice in a local newspaper office, later working as a journeyman printer in St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Washington and elsewhere. He spent two years learning the river and becoming a riverboat pilot, but his career on the river was ended by the Civil War. After spending two weeks in a ragtag unit of the Missouri State Guard that was sympathetic to the Confederacy, he set out for the Nevada Territory with his brother and tried to strike it rich mining silver. Although he failed as a prospector, he succeeded as a journalist. He got his first taste of national fame when his Jumping Frog story (The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County) appeared in 1865. He courted Olivia Langdon of Elmira, New York, and published The Innocents Abroad in 1869, to great popular acclaim. He married, started a family, and began writing the books for which he is best known today while living in the family mansion he built in Hartford, Connecticut. Financial problems forced him to close the house and relocate the family to Europe in the early 1890s. Later in that decade he would pull himself out of bankruptcy by embarking on a lecture tour that took him to Africa and Asia. As the 19th century ended and the 20th century began, he condemned his country—and several European powers—for the imperialist adventures they had pursued around the world, and he became vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League. The accolades and honors bestowed on him in his later years failed to fill the hole in his heart created by the death of his wife and two of his daughters. He died in 1910.

In 1899, the Times dubbed Twain " Ambassador at Large of the U.S.A." He had seen more of the world than any major American writer had before him, and his books would be translated into over 70 languages. Cartoonists made him as recognizable an icon worldwide as "Uncle Sam". Twain was one of the U.S.A.'s first genuinely cosmopolitan citizens, someone who felt as at home in the world as in his native land.

"What is the most rigorous law of our being?" Twain asked in a paper he delivered the year Huckleberry Finn was published. His answer? "Growth. No smallest atom of our moral, mental or physical structure can stand still a year.... In other words, we change—and must change, constantly, and keep on changing as long as we live." This child of slaveholders who grew up to write a book that many view as the most profoundly anti-racist novel by an American clearly spoke from his own experience. Troubled by his own failure to question the unjust status quo during his Hannibal childhood, Twain became a compelling critic of people's ready acceptance of what he called "the lie of silent assertion"—the "silent assertion that nothing is going on which fair and intelligent men are aware of and are engaged by their duty to try to stop." Experience also taught him not to underestimate the transformative power of humor. The greatest satirist America has produced wrote that the human "race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—Laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication , Persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug —push it a little—crowd it a little—weaken it a little, century by century; but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand."

威廉·福克纳称马克·吐温为“第一位真正的美国作家”，尤金·奥尼尔将他誉为“真正的美国文学之父”。查尔斯·达尔文将《傻子国外旅行记》放在床头柜上，睡觉前想头脑静一静或放松一下时，伸手就可以取到。《镀金时代》将这个名字赋予了整整一个时代（编注：1873年，马克·吐温出版了小说《镀金时代》。此后，人们用这个词来形容从南北战争结束到20世纪初的那一段美国历史）。约瑟夫·康拉德驾汽船在刚果河上航行时，常常想到《密西西比河上的生活》。弗里德里希·尼采对《汤姆·索亚历险记》倾心不已。鲁迅痴迷《夏娃日记》，将它译成了汉语。欧内斯特·海明威称“所有美国当代文学全都源自马克·吐温的一本书——《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》”；而和他一样获得过诺贝尔文学奖的大江健三郎对《哈克》一书更是赞赏有加，称该书有力地影射了他自己在战后破败的日本所处的状况，正是在它的启发下，他才写出了平生第一部小说。富兰克林·德拉诺·罗斯福总统借用了《亚瑟王朝廷里的康涅狄克州美国佬》中的“新政”一词，这部作品也令科幻小说巨匠艾萨克·阿西莫夫对吐温心存感激，因为正是吐温发明了“穿越时空”这种方式。何塞·马蒂读《美国佬》一书时大为感动，简直想“跑到康涅狄格的首府哈特福德去跟吐温握手”，因为书中对“那些爬到自己同胞头上敲骨吸髓、榨取血汗的卑劣之徒”刻画得入木三分。

马克·吐温一直被誉为美国的塞万提斯、荷马、托尔斯泰、莎士比亚和拉伯雷。他早期的随笔妙趣横生，不乏轻松活泼的俚语和不动声色的幽默，后来的小说则把美国人的性格刻画得精准到位。不管是早期随笔还是后期小说，吐温的作品让全世界的读者认识了形形色色的美国人，而这些人说起话来自然都带着与众不同的美国味。《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》是美国文学的“独立宣言”，是任何英国人都写不出来的一本书——从民主精神的角度来看，这本书扩展了现代小说能够做什么以及能够成为什么的可能性。

吐温帮我们界定了散文的节奏，标出了道德地图上的等高线。他看到了我们最优秀的品质，也看到了我们最龌龊的一面；看到了我们过高的希望，也看到了我们惊人的失败；看到了我们可以付之一笑的小毛病，也看到了我们欲哭无泪的大缺陷。他比我们更了解美国人的梦想和抱负，更熟悉我们成就伟业的潜能和面对灾难的潜力。他的小说照亮了他所生活、我们所继承的这个世界，并在这个过程中改变着世界和我们。他知道我们的脚常常随着一些因某种原因令我们自己听不见的曲子而舞动；他用极佳的音调给我们演奏了那些曲子。

他用词恰当，该用一个词就绝对不会错用成意义相近的另一个词。这为他赢得了权威，每当他发表意见时，无论亲自开口，还是付诸文章，人们都洗耳恭听。（“用词是差不离还是恰到好处，其实是一个大问题——两者之间的差别就像萤火虫与闪电之间的差别那样大。”）

吐温奇特、大胆而又极为新颖别致的小说和非小说类作品触及了一些我们至今还在苦苦思索的千古难题，譬如说：一个以自由为基石的国家，其缔造者却蓄养奴隶，这该如何理解；我们意识到了科技的破坏力，却还一如既往地信赖科技，这该怎么解释；帝国主义的问题该如何解决，消灭帝国主义又面临着什么样的难题。确实，如今要想在目力所及的范围内找到一个吐温在自己的作品中未曾涉及的问题，非常之难。遗传因素与环境因素的比较？动物权益？性别界线？美国文化传统中黑人的话语地位？吐温的笔下皆有所涉及。讽刺作家迪克·格雷戈里曾经说过，吐温“远远地走在自己时代的前面，别人根本就不可与他同日而语”。

刚刚出道的时候，吐温被誉为天赋奇才的幽默家。但事实证明，诙谐有趣的表面下掩藏着的是意想不到的深刻。（“没错，你说得对，”吐温在1902年给一个朋友的信中写道，“我骨子里是一个道德家。”）一次又一次，吐温的写作总是出乎读者的预料，他用一些以前不能算作文学的材料编出了一些令人难以忘却的故事。对此，威廉·迪安·豪威尔斯曾这样评价：“他信步走进了整齐有序的文学领域，闲散地穿过里面一条条维护得干净整洁的小路，随意地在草地上走来走去，毫不理会那些从文学诞生之日就高高竖起的警示牌，牌子上那些警告人们哪怕越雷池半步都可能招致危险和惩罚的恐吓之语，对他来说毫无意义。”

吐温集多重性格于一身：富有人情味，但喜欢冷嘲热讽；富于同情心，却缺乏耐心；有时令人忍俊不禁，有时又让人望而生畏；具有极敏锐的观察力，别人却难以看透他的内心。正是受了他的影响，20世纪的不少作家——不只是美国作家，而是全世界的作家——才成为文学大家的。作家们无不惊叹于吐温驾驭语言的艺术，他作品中的语言皆是从普通百姓的话语中提炼而来，而在此之前，这样的话语若在文学作品中出现，往往只会招来他人的嘲弄。豪尔赫·路易斯·博尔赫斯就曾在《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》一书中注意到了此类语言的使用，他说“这是第一次看到有一位美国作家用毫不矫揉造作的美国语言来写作”。从阿瑟·米勒到托尼·莫里森，无数美国作家都从吐温那里学到了小说创作的主要基本功。就连视觉艺术领域的一些重量级人物也发现阅读马克·吐温的作品受益匪浅。比如漫画家查克·琼斯就是其中一位，琼斯是塑造哔哔鸟、大笨狼、兔八哥等美国流行文化经典形象的关键人物，而他把这些形象的塑造归功于他早年阅读的马克·吐温的一本书——《苦行记》。

萨姆·克莱门斯（1863年启用笔名“马克·吐温”）1835年出生在密苏里州的佛罗里达村，在密苏里州的汉尼拔镇度过了自己的童年时代。1847年，父亲去世，11岁的山姆结束了正规的学校教育，在当地的一家报社里当了一名印刷学徒工；后来，他又先后在圣路易斯、纽约、费城、华盛顿等地打工，身份是熟练印刷工。他花了两年的时间了解密西西比河，并成为河船上的一名领航员，但南北战争的爆发结束了他在这条河流上的领航生涯。在同情美国南部联邦的密苏里州自卫队的一个贱民营里待了两周之后，他与哥哥一道动身去了内华达领地，打算靠开采银矿发一笔横财。虽然采矿的计划以失败而告终，但他却成功地成了一名记者。1865年，他的《跳蛙》故事（《卡县名蛙》）问世，这使他第一次尝到了名扬全国的滋味。1869年，他向纽约州埃尔迈拉市的奥莉维娅·兰登求婚，并出版了广受欢迎的《傻子国外旅行记》。他结了婚，成了家，在康涅狄格州的首府哈特福德盖起了大宅子。住在自家的宅邸里，他开始了现在最广为人知的一批作品的创作。19世纪90年代初，他在财政上出现了问题，这迫使他背井离乡，举家迁往欧洲。19世纪90年代后期，为了免于破产，他踏上了演讲之旅，先后去了非洲和亚洲。随着19世纪的结束和20世纪的到来，他开始谴责自己的国家，还有好几个欧洲强国，谴责它们在世界各地大肆扩张的帝国主义行径，这期间他当上了反帝国主义同盟的副主席。晚年的他获得了一大堆的称号和荣誉，但所有这些都未能填补妻子和两个女儿的去世在他的心灵上留下的那个空洞。1910年，他离开了人世。

1899年，英国《泰晤士报》称吐温为“美利坚合众国无任所大使”。他到过的地方、见过的世面比他之前的任何一个知名美国作家都要多，他的作品被译成了七十多种语言。漫画家们将他描绘成了一个和“山姆大叔”一样普天之下无人不识的形象。吐温是美国第一批名副其实的世界公民，一个在世界上任何地方都感觉像在自己的祖国一样轻松自在、舒适自如的人。

“我们人类最严酷的法则是什么？”吐温在《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》出版那一年宣读的一篇论文中这样问道。他的回答？“是发展。我们的道德、精神和身体结构的最小原子没有一个能保持一年静止不动的……换句话说，我们在不断地变化，也必须不断地变化，只要生命不息，变化就不止。”这个奴隶主的孩子长大后写了一本书，而在很多人看来，这本书是一个美国人用自己的亲身经历写出的一部最深刻的反种族主义的小说。在汉尼拔度过的那段童年时光，吐温未能对当时不公平的现状提出质疑，对此，他一直深感不安。这种不安使得他对人们轻易接受那种他称之为“无声断言的谎言”的行为提出了犀利的批评——这种“无声的断言认为，正在发生的这一切对于有良知的聪明人来说，既意识不到，也无责任加以阻止”。经验还教会了他不要小看幽默的变革威力。这位美国有史以来最伟大的讽刺作家曾这样写道：“人类，虽然贫困，却无疑有一种真正有效的武器——笑声。权力、金钱、劝导、祈祷、迫害——这些东西可以把谎言的巨石举起来，推一推，挤一挤，然后一个世纪复一个世纪，将之削弱那么一点；但只有笑声的摧枯拉朽之力才能将之化为碎屑，一举销毁。笑声所向披靡，世间无一物可与之匹敌。 LlwgrfPsWs4eP5SHqVJ9ecjbNZxf3CT3MW69iPAGeajh4jn7pdb9Bl1+SFV6Wf1O