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By Lyman Hafen
Several years ago on a business trip to the Midwest, I drove up the Mississippi River from St. Louis to Hannibal, Missouri. Standing in the places where Samuel Langhorne Clemens lived, worked, and played as a boy was a seminal experience for me. There is nothing quite as satisfying to an American boy of my generation than to actually be in those places where Mark Twain first conjured the likes of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. As I walked along the whitewashed fence and stepped into the Clemens family home at 206 Hill Street, I was overcome by a powerful form of nostalgia, recalling scenes from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and equating them to my own memories of youth in my own small-town neighborhood.
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In his writing, Twain drew from every part of his life, but his memories of Hannibal always remained the true north of his compass of fact. “If you attempt to create & build a wholly imaginary incident, adventure or situation,” he once wrote in a notebook, “you will go astray, & the artificiality of the thing will be detectable. But if you found on a fact in your personal experience, it is an acorn, a root, & every created adornment that grows up out of it & spreads its foliage & blossoms to the sun will seem realities, not inventions. You will not be likely to go astray; your compass of fact is there to keep you on the right course.”
