Samuel Langhorne Clemens, more commonly known by his pseudonym, Mark Twain, was born in 1835 in what he later called "the almost invisible village" of Florida, Missouri. When he was a young child, Twain moved with his family about twenty miles away to Hannibal, Missouri, which is situated on the Mississippi River. Hannibal, Twain later said, was a town where "everybody was poor but didn't know it, and everybody was comfortable and did know it." Hannibal became Twain's model for the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and in Hannibal began Twain's lifelong love for the great Mississippi River. As a boy, Twain played often near the Mississippi, fascinated by the many steamboats traveling up and down the river, and for fun he would build his own small rafts and float upon the river himself. Twain's childhood activities in Hannibal are often...