Library of Congress presents ‘Mark Twain’s America’

Mark Twain is considered by some to be one of America’s earliest celebrities — those book tours! the signature white suits! — and his legacy as a writer has proved to be one of the country’s most lasting.

His books are still read in school and out. There are novels younger readers, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” and for grown-ups, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” “The Diaries of Adam and Eve” and “The Prince and the Pauper.” His nonfiction books include “Life on the Mississippi,” “Roughing It,” “A Tramp Abroad” and heaps of newspaper articles, opinion pieces and public lectures.

Twain’s life encompassed a fascinating time in the country’s history. Born Samuel Clemens in 1835 in Missouri, he trained as a printer’s apprentice and wound up piloting a riverboat on the Mississippi, where he took his pen name from a call to measure the river’s depths. He set out for the Nevada Territory, where miners were making a fortune, and began writing humorous reports about what he saw. That took him to California and Hawaii, and while he settled in Connecticut, he continued to travel across America and abroad, writing all the while.

In the new book “Mark Twain’s America” by Harry L. Katz (Little, Brown, 256 pp., $40) Twain’s life, work and cultural relevance are revealed through the collections at the Library of Congress. There are photographs and postcards, maps and letters, magazines and paintings and, of course, books. Take a look in the gallery above.

“Other books on Mark Twain have used materials from the Library of Congress,” writes the Librarian of Congress James H. Billington in the book’s preface, “but none has reached so deeply into our collections to provide a portrait of the artist and the country that inspired him.”

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