The Biography of Mark Twain - Essay Example

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a touching story that takes place in a milieu full of schemers and racists. Only the boy and his friend, a runaway slave, represent the best of the United States—men who light out for the country. The rest of the nation is relentlessly skewered. Huck and Jim run into a family that is feuding with another family. A feud is described as follows “. . . a feud is this way: A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that other man’s brother kills him; then the other brothers, on both sides, go for one another; then the cousins chip in – and by and by everybody’s killed off, and there ain’t no more feud” (150). Even in his autobiography Twain was willing to satirize himself: "You will never know how much enjoyment you've lost until you get to dictating your biography,” he once wrote (NPR).

            Even in his personal life, Twain was a funny man. He was born during Halley's Comet, which appears every 75 years or so. As the return of the comet approached, he said: “I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'” This is a great example of a man whose independence of mind and satirical wit made him one of the greats of any age.