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Mark Twain's work captures the child that lives in the American psyche and also presents the confusions of the American adult. As a mature writer, Twain could recreate the small-town boyhood he had known by the Mississippi River in those halcyon years before the Civil War. His philosophical ponderings, however, kept leading him back to simple views of mankind as either deservedly damned or irresponsibly determined, and then, finally, as a figment of some celestial imagination, "wandering forlorn among the empty eternities," disillusioned with the world in which he finds himself but unable to make his way to any other. Mark Twain is best known for his evocations of pre-Civil War life along the Mississippi in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Still, readers have cherished almost as much his books of wandering, whether factually based travel books, such as The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), A Tramp Abroad (1880), and Following the Equator (1897) or fiction like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), and his later bitter contemplations of the human heart: Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" (1900), and The Mysterious Stranger (1916), unfinished at the time of his death.
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