Twain was himself one of the ornaments of the Gilded Age, a self-invented boy named Samuel Clemens from Hannibal, Missouri, who had worked the steamboats of the Mississippi, toiled in silver mines and then in 1876 published his Adventures of Tom Sawyer, based on his exploits and taking his nom de plume from the cry ‘mark twain’ of the leadsmen who measured the depth of the river.
