Samuel Langhorne Clemens, best known by his pen name
Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced", and William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature". His novels include
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the latter of which has often been called the "Great American Novel". Twain also wrote
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and
Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.