[Portrait] Using the pen name Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens had become one of this country's favorite satiric writers by the early 1870s. He transformed the American tradition of humorous colloquial narrative into high art with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Inspired by his own boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri, these pre-Civil War tales of youth along the Mississippi have delighted readers for generations.

Frank Edwin Larson painted this portrait in 1935, basing it on photographs of Twain taken during the early 1900s by Frederick Bradley, Sr.

Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, gift of Frank Edwin Larson

Posthumous portrait of Mark Twain (1835-1910), 1935, by Frank Edwin Larson (1895-1991), oil on canvas

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