Mark Twain Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens. (1835 — 1910) A famous American writer, entrepreneur, publisher and lecturer. Among his best-known novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Prince and the Pauper, and others. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) is a novel about a young boy growing up along the Mississippi River, set in the fictional town of St. Petersburg. Tom Sawyer is more than a boyhood adventure story, it is a tale of maturing, a novel whose principal subject is the moral, psychological, and intellectual development of a youthful main character.