Mark Twain

1835–1910

The river, the lie, and the conscience that outruns the crowd.

Mark Twain worked as a riverboat pilot before he became one of America's most quoted writers, and that river shows up throughout his fiction. He wrote in plain, funny, spoken-sounding English at a time when most literary prose did not, and used that voice to take direct aim at slavery, hypocrisy, and small-town pretension.