Don Brown - American Boy: The Adventures of Mark Twain

AMERICAN BOY
THE ADVENTURES OF MARK TWAIN

written and illustrated byD ON B ROWN

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON

F OR N ANCY AND C HRIS

Copyright 2003 by Don Brown

All rights reserved.
For information about permission
to reproduce selections from this book, write to
Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com

The text of this book is set in ITC Century Book.
The illustrations are pen and ink and watercolor on paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brown, Don.
American boy : the adventures of Mark Twain / written and illustrated
by Don Brown.
p. cm.
Summary: Provides a brief biography of the noted American writer who was born Samuel Clemens.
Includes bibliographical references (p. )
HC ISBN 0-618-17997-6 PA ISBN 0-618-68950-8
1. Twain, Mark, 1835-1910Childhood and youthJuvenile literature.
2. Authors, American19th centuryBiographyJuvenile literature.
[1. Twain, Mark, 1835-1910. 2. Authors, American.] I. Title.
PS1332 .B76 2003
818'.409dc21

2002151177

HC ISBN-13: 978-0618-17997-8
PA ISBN-13: 978-0618-68950-7

Manufactured in the United States of America
WOZ 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

M IDNIGHT 1849

Y OUNG S AM C LEMENS bolted out his bedroom window, lighted onto a shed, scrambled over a whitewashed fence, and plunged into the winter night. He met his friend Tom Nash and raced to the frozen Mississippi River. They had sneaked out to skate and were joyful or, as Sam might have said, in high feather.

It was a foolish thing to do, and his mother wouldn't have approved. But that added to the fun for Sam, because there was no "amusement to be gotten out of skating at midnight if nobody was going to object to it."

Sam and Tom had skated a half-mile out on the moonlit river when they suddenly heard grinding and rumbling. The ice was breaking up! The boys sped toward the shore, skipping from ice cake to ice cake on the frigid, open water.

"We flew along at full speed whenever the moonlight sifting down between the clouds enabled us to tell which was ice and which was water," Sam later recalled.

Tom spilled into the river. Though he managed to reach the shore, the dunking proved dear for him. Tom later took ill, and the fever robbed him of his hearing for life.

Meanwhile, Sam returned home dry and safe, and with a great tale to boot.

Sam loved a great tale.

In time, he would write some of America's greatest tales.

N OVEMBER 30, 1835

"I COULD SEE NO PROMISE IN HIM ," Sam's mother, Jane, said of him on his birth in Missouri on November 30, 1835.

He was small and weak, and the excitement of his arrival was nearly undone by the fear of his quick departure. Still, Jane was hopeful. Surely the appearance of Halley's comet, burning bright in the sky, was a good omen. Halley's comet or not, Sam survived.

In 1839, the Clemens family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a drowsy patchwork of simple streets, shops, houses, yards, and alleys beside the Mississippi River where, on a summer morning, roaming pigs might appear to outnumber the people.

Sam's father, John, had great expectations of success in Hannibal. But the stern, unsmiling man had no talent for business, and the family's fortune tumbled instead.

Despite the poverty, Sam's mother maintained a "sunshiney disposition."

She also could be wickedly funny, told a good story, and had a weakness for animals; one time, she provided shelter to nineteen cats. Sam was very much like his mother.

He was also a dreamer and a prankster. Hannibal proved to be a paradise in which Sam could exercise his enormous imagination and taste for mischief. The town brimmed with like-minded boys. Will Bowen was Sam's best friend. The two jumped at the chance for monkey business.

They played hooky,

sneaked from their beds to explore sleeping Hannibal,

and once loosened a giant boulder, sending it crashing down a hill and into a shed.

Both Sam and Will kept a frowned-upon friendship with Hannibal's wild boy, Tom Blankenship.

Tom was from a seedy family and was dreaded by the town's respectable mothers. He never went to school or church, nor need obey anybody. Sam ignored Tom's outcast reputation.

"He was ignorant, unwashed, and insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as any boy had," Sam said.

SAM

WILL

TOM BLANKENSHIP