Mark Twain 's legacy includes awards, events, a variety of memorials and namesakes, and numerous works of art, entertainment, and media.
Mark Twain 's legacy includes awards, events, a variety of memorials and namesakes, and numerous works of art, entertainment, and media.
Awards in his name proliferate:
Several schools are named after him, including:
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Many sites have been named after Twain. Many buildings associated with the writer, including some of his many homes, have been preserved as museums.
Marion County is a county located in the northeastern portion of Missouri. As of the 2020 census, the population was 28,525. Its county seat is Palmyra. Unique from most third-class counties in the state, Marion has two county courthouses, the second located in Hannibal. The county was organized on December 23, 1826 and named for General Francis Marion, the "Swamp Fox," who was from South Carolina and served in the American Revolutionary War. The area was known as the "Two Rivers Country" before organization.
Florida is a village in Monroe County, Missouri, United States. It is located at the intersection of Missouri Route 107 and State Route U on the shores of Mark Twain Lake. The population was 200, per the census data in the 1911 Cram's World Atlas. The population was however down to nine residents according to the 2000 United States Census, and following the 2010 Census, the village was reported as uninhabited. The Mark Twain Birthplace State Historic Site is located in Florida, with Mark Twain State Park nearby.
Hannibal is a city along the Mississippi River in Marion and Ralls counties in the U.S. state of Missouri. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, the population was 17,312, making it the largest city in Marion County. The bulk of the city is in Marion County, with a tiny sliver in the south extending into Ralls County.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature." His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel." Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.
Life on the Mississippi is a memoir by Mark Twain of his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War published in 1883. It is also a travel book, recounting his trips on the Mississippi River, from St. Louis to New Orleans and then from New Orleans to Saint Paul, many years after the war.
The Adventures of Mark Twain is a 1944 American biographical film directed by Irving Rapper and starring Fredric March as Samuel Clemens and Alexis Smith as Twain's wife Olivia. Produced by Warner Bros., the film was nominated for three Academy Awards, including that for Best Music for Max Steiner's score. Irving Rapper was hesitant to direct the film but was persuaded by Hal B. Wallis.
Riverworld is a sci-fi/fantasy feature-length pilot episode for a series that was never produced. It aired on the Sci-Fi Channel in 2003. It was loosely based on the Hugo Award-winning "Riverworld" saga by Philip José Farmer. Production began in 2001.
The Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum is located on 206-208 Hill Street, Hannibal, Missouri, on the west bank of the Mississippi River in the United States. It was the home of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as author Mark Twain, from 1844 to 1853. Clemens found the inspiration for many of his stories, including the white picket fence, while living here. It has been open to the public as a museum since 1912, and was designated a National Historic Landmark on December 29, 1962. It is located in the Mark Twain Historic District.
Olivia Langdon Clemens was the wife of the American author Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known under his pen name Mark Twain.
The Adventures of Mark Twain, also known as Comet Quest in the United Kingdom, is a 1985 American independent stop-motion claymation fantasy film directed by Will Vinton and starring James Whitmore. It received a limited theatrical release in May 1985 and was released on DVD in January 2006 and again as a collector's edition in 2012 on DVD and Blu-ray.
Mark Twain: The Musical is a stage musical biography of Mark Twain that had a ten-year summertime run in Elmira, NY and Hartford, CT (1987–1995) and was telecast on a number of public television stations. An original cast CD was released by Premier Recordings in 1988, and LML Music in 2009 issued a newly mastered and complete version of the score. Video and DVD versions of the show are currently in release.
The Mark Twain Birthplace State Historic Site is a publicly owned property in Florida, Missouri, maintained by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, that preserves the cabin where the author Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in 1835. The cabin is protected within a modern museum building that also includes a public reading room, several of Twain's first editions, a handwritten manuscript of his 1876 novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and furnishings from Twain's Connecticut home. The historic site is adjacent to Mark Twain State Park on a peninsula at the western end of man-made Mark Twain Lake. The cabin was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1969.
Huckleberry "Huck" Finn is a fictional character created by Mark Twain who first appeared in the book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and is the protagonist and narrator of its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). He is 12 to 13 years old during the former and a year older at the time of the latter. Huck also narrates Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective, two shorter sequels to the first two books.
Orion Clemens was the first and only Secretary of the Nevada Territory. His younger brother Samuel Langhorne Clemens became a famous author under the pen name Mark Twain.
Riverworld is a television film that had been intended to be a four-hour television miniseries released on the Syfy channel on April 18, 2010. Based on the Riverworld books by Philip José Farmer, this miniseries is a reboot of the cancelled Sci-Fi Channel Riverworld television series, of which only the pilot episode was produced.
Mark Twain Cave — originally McDowell's Cave — is a show cave located near Hannibal, Missouri. It was named for author Mark Twain whose real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Clemens lived in Hannibal from 1839 to 1853, age 4 to 17. It is the oldest operating show cave in the state, giving tours continuously since 1886. Along with nearby Cameron Cave, it became a registered National Natural Landmark in 1972, with a citation reading "Exceptionally good examples of the maze type of cavern development." The cave — as "McDougal's Cave" — plays an important role in the novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) by Mark Twain and was renamed in honor of the author in 1880.
The Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, was the home of Samuel Langhorne Clemens and his family from 1874 to 1891. It was designed by Edward Tuckerman Potter and built in the American High Gothic style. Clemens biographer Justin Kaplan has called it "part steamboat, part medieval fortress and part cuckoo clock."
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is an 1876 novel by Mark Twain about a boy, Tom Sawyer, growing up along the Mississippi River. It is set in the 1840s in the town of St. Petersburg, which is based on Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain lived as a boy. In the novel, Sawyer has several adventures, often with his friend Huckleberry Finn. Originally a commercial failure, the book ended up being the best-selling of Twain's works during his lifetime. Though overshadowed by its 1884 sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the book is considered by many to be a masterpiece of American literature. It is alleged by Mark Twain to be one of the first novels to be written on a typewriter.
Cindy Lovell is an American educator and writer.
Jane Lampton Clemens was the mother of author Mark Twain. She was the inspiration of the character "Aunt Polly" in Twain's 1876 novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. She was regarded as a "cheerful, affectionate, and strong woman" with a "gift for storytelling" and as the person from whom Mark Twain inherited his sense of humor.