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Mark Twain is the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910). He was a great adventurer and travelled round America as a printer; prospected for gold and set off for South America to earn his fortune. He returned to become a steam-boat pilot on the Mississippi River, close to where he had grown up. He started to use the alias Mark Twain during the Civil War and it was under this pen name that he became a famous travel writer. Mark Twain was always nostalgic about his childhood and in 1876The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published, based on his own experiences. The book was soon recognised as a work of genius and eight years later the sequel,The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was published. The great writer Ernest Hemingway claimed that 'All modern literature stems from this one book.' Robert Ingpen was born in 1936 in Geelong, Australia, and studied illustration art and book design at The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. In 1986 he was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal for his contribution to children's literature and he has been honoured with Membership of the Order of Australia.
