Mark Twain’s Absurd, Noble America

In 1835, when Samuel Clemens was born, the United States was a fledgling 59 years old, a drooling infant in the actuarial terms of political history. By the time The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published, Clemens—by then known to the reading public as Mark Twain—was a mature 50 years old, but the nation remained an unsteady toddler at 109, though it often precociously carried itself like a violent adolescent estranged from its father, a minor prematurely emancipated due to irreconcilable differences.