Samuel Langhorne Clemans, known to most as Mark Twain, has been hailed by many as the father of American Literature. His two most famous works, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), are considered two of the greatest American novels of all time. Twain was born in Florida, Missouri on 30th November 1835. He grew up in the town of Hannibal on the Mississippi River, which would eventually serve as the basis for the place where Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn would live. Twain grew up in Missouri at a time when it was a slave state. After the American Civil War broke out, he became a strong supporter of emancipation, and staunchly believed that the slave trade should be abolished. Though he began as a comic writer, the tribulations he faced in his personal life perhaps served to turn him into a serious, even pessimistic, writer in his later years. He lost his wife and two daughters, and his ill-fated life never really allowed him to recover. Twain passed away in 1910, but he is still one of the best-loved writers around the world.