The Clemenses lived—Sam, born prematurely, in precarious health—in Florida for four years. Then the cycle of movement-enthusiasmdisillusionment- movement uprooted them and sent them to the edge of the Mississippi, to Hannibal, thirty miles away. There young Sam spent his youth, living and absorbing the childhood memories that have become a part of American legend and folklore.
His rudimentary formal education lasted only until 1847, when his father died, leaving the family nearly destitute. John Marshall Clemens's steady procession of business failures and the family's frequent moves from house to house in Hannibal undoubtedly impressed upon Sam the goading obsession for success and conspicuous consumption that marked his own mature years.
In addition to his schooling Sam's education continued in the woods outside Hannibal, on the Mississippi River which served as a dangerous playground for the boys of the town, and at his uncle's farm back in Florida, Missouri, where Sam spent most of his summers. Hannibal was a mixture of slaveholding outpost, frontier jumpingoff point, and orthodox Calvinist bastion, and infused with the idyllic, pastoral, carefree world he recollected in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) was a layer of violence, horror, and inhumanity that surfaced in his writing only in his middle and old age.
