Happy Birthday, Samuel Clemens!

"Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls,

"I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves."—from the Preface to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Satirist Samuel Langhorne Clemens, also known by his pen name Mark Twain, grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, a Mississippi River town that inspired his famous novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Richard Guy Walton's painting and this passage from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer recall Clemens's genius.

"Shortly Tom came upon the juvenile pariah of the village, Huckleberry Finn, son of the town drunkard. Huckleberry was cordially hated and dreaded by all mothers of the town because he was idle, and lawless, and vulgar, and bad—and because all their children admired him so, and delighted in his forbidden society, and wished they dared to be like him. Tom was like the rest of the respectable boys in that he envied Huckleberry his gaudy outcast condition, and was under strict orders not to play with him. So he played with him every time he got a chance."

Pictured: Richard Guy Walton, born 1914, Tom, Huck and the Dead Cat, 1939, oil on fiberboard, 48 x 42 1/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the artist.