Who wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer?

Mark Twain - the pen name of Samuel Clemens, taken from a Mississippi riverboat call meaning two fathoms, the depth at which a steamboat was safe. He had been a licensed river pilot before the Civil War closed the traffic, and said it was the only occupation he ever truly loved.

Tom Sawyer in 1876 is the sunlit one; Huckleberry Finn eight years later is the book that mattered and the one that still causes trouble. It is narrated in vernacular by an uneducated boy, which was itself a radical decision, and its moral centre is Huck deciding to help Jim escape and concluding that he will go to hell for it - the joke being that the reader knows he is right and he does not. Hemingway's line that all modern American literature comes from it is an overstatement that most people have not managed to improve on.

It has been challenged and banned continuously since publication, first for coarseness and then, from the 1950s, for its language - it uses a racial slur over two hundred times. The arguments about whether it should be taught, and in what edition, are still live in American schools, and they are not simple: the word is doing deliberate work in a book that is attacking the thing it describes.