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the weak or vulnerable individual.Survivors, like Twain’s Huck Finn,Humphrey Vanderveyden in London’sThe Sea-Wolf, and Dreiser’sopportunistic Sister Carrie, endurethrough inner strength involvingkindness, flexibility, and, above all,individuality.SAMUEL CLEMENS(MARK TWAIN) (1835-1910)Samuel Clemens, better knownby his pen name of MarkTwain, grew up in theMississippi River frontier town ofHannibal, Missouri. ErnestHemingway’s famous statementthat all of American literaturecomes from one great book,Twain’s Adventures of HuckleberryFinn, indicates this author’s toweringplace in the tradition. Early19th-century American writerstended to be too flowery, sentimental,or ostentatious — partiallybecause they were still trying toprove that they could write as elegantlyas the English. Twain’s style,based on vigorous, realistic, colloquialAmerican speech, gaveAmerican writers a new appreciationof their national voice. Twainwas the first major author to comefrom the interior of the country,and he captured its distinctive,humorous slang and iconoclasm.For Twain and other Americanwriters of the late 19th century,realism was not merely a literarytechnique: It was a way of speakingtruth and exploding worn-out conventions.Thus it was profoundlyliberating and potentially at oddsSAMUEL CLEMENS(MARK TWAIN)Illustration byThaddeus A. Miksinski, Jr.with society. The most well-knownexample is Huck Finn, a poor boywho decides to follow the voice ofhis conscience and help a Negroslave escape to freedom, eventhough Huck thinks this means thathe will be damned to hell for breakingthe law.Twain’s masterpiece, which appearedin 1884, is set in the MississippiRiver village of St. Petersburg.The son of an alcoholic bum,Huck has just been adopted by arespectable family when his father,in a drunken stupor, threatens tokill him. Fearing for his life, Huckescapes, feigning his own death. Heis joined in his escape by anotheroutcast, the slave Jim, whoseowner, Miss Watson, is thinking ofselling him down the river to theharsher slavery of the deep South.Huck and Jim float on a raft downthe majestic Mississippi, but aresunk by a steamboat, separated,and later reunited. They go throughmany comical and dangerous shoreadventures that show the variety,generosity, and sometimes cruel irrationalityof society. In the end, itis discovered that Miss Watson hadalready freed Jim, and a respectablefamily is taking care of thewild boy Huck. But Huck growsimpatient with civilized society andplans to escape to “the territories”— Indian lands. The ending givesthe reader the counter-version ofthe classic American success myth:the open road leading to the pristinewilderness, away from themorally corrupting influences of“civilization.” James Fenimore48