Critical Insights: Mark Twain

Mark Twain remains one of America's most beloved literary figures. Eminently quotable, his best writing combines irreverent humor with practical good sense and deep human feeling and, perhaps more so than the work of any other author, defines what it is to be an American. His most beloved novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is a nostalgic paean to a simpler, more innocent America, one in which it is still possible to "light out for the Territory."