Mark Twain

Most people meet him through a line — something short, dry, and aimed at someone's pretensions. That reputation rests on a body of work built in ordinary American speech rather than literary polish, with *Huckleberry Finn* the book usually held up as the proof of it. The target was hypocrisy, and the weapon was plain vernacular.

He was born in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and worked as a humorist, journalist and novelist. Travel, letters and steady reading did much of the shaping; so did apprenticeships and collaborations, which left him with a craft habit rather than a theory. His early writing was not especially novel, but it was clear, and clarity became something close to a working rule.

In mid-career the books, essays and lectures pulled tentative ideas into settled form, and critics and rivals pushed the arguments harder than he might have on his own. Later he turned to sorting and stabilising what he had made — notes, editions, reflective pieces. The surviving drafts and corrections show the effort behind the finished prose. He died in 1910. What lasted was less any single result than the ability to stay intelligible under pressure.