urists (Bain, Flora, and Rubin 103). Many claim that The Innocents Abroad is Mark Twain’s second-best book (Unger 198).In 1870 he married Olivia Langdon. After living briefly in Buffalo, New York, the couple moved to Hartford, Connecticut (Bain, Flora, and Rubin 104). Much of Mark Twain’s best work was written in the 1870’s and 1880’s in Hartford and during the summers at Quarry Farm, near Elmira, New York (Bain Flora and Rubin 104). It was at Quarry Farm that he wrote Roughing It in 1872, which recounts his early adventures as a miner and journalist. While vacationing in New York one summer in 1876 he wrote his most famous story of all. Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Bloom 50). It is about Tom Sawyer, who is a twelve-year-old boy who lives on the Mississippi River. He is mischievous, adventurous, and humorous. Tom is loved by readers around the world. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer brought Twain to the top of the best-seller’s list, where he remained for eight weeks (Unger 199). Mark Twain once said that he liked Tom Sawyer because “Tom represented everything that he had loved as a boy, and because if the world thought like Tom Sawyer, everyone would forget about their troubles and become happier people” (Kunitz 355).Twain wrote the sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1884. The sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is considered by many to be Twain’s masterpiece (Mark Twain 1). The book is the story of Tom Sawyer’s best friend, Huck. He flees his father, the town drunk, by raft down the Mississippi River with a runaway slave, Jim. The pair’s adventures show Huck and the reader the cruelty of which men and women are capable. Another theme of the novel is the conflict between Huck’s feelings of friendship with Jim, who is one of the few people he can trust, and his knowledge that he is breaking the laws of the time by helping Jim esc...
