Mark Twain

Narrator (voice)

Mark Twain

Other Voices (voice)

Olivia 'Livy' Langdon Clemens (voice)

Other Voices (voice)

Other Voices (voice)

Other Voices (voice)

Other Voices (voice)

Himself (uncredited)

Herself (uncredited)

Herself (uncredited)

Himself (uncredited)

Himself (uncredited)

Himself (uncredited)

Himself (uncredited)

Himself (uncredited)

Herself (uncredited)

Himself (uncredited)

Himself (archive footage) (uncredited)

Mark Twain: [referring to his boyhood friend Tom Blankenship] He was the only really independent person - boy or man - in the community, and by consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy and was envied by all the rest of us.

Mark Twain: I was born the 30th of November, 1835, in the almost invisible village of Florida, Monroe County, Missouri... The village contained a hundred people and I increased the population by one per cent. It is more than many of the best men in history could have done for a town... There is no record of a person doing as much, not even Shakespeare. But I did it for Florida, Missouri, and it shows I could have done it for any place - even London, I suppose.

Narrator: He was a Southerner and a Northerner, a Westerner and a New England Yankee; a tireless wanderer who lived in a thousand places all around the world. He would call just two of them home: the Missouri town of his childhood, which he would transform into the idealized hometown of every American boy, and the magnificent Connecticut house he built for his wife and children, which he hoped would shelter them from hardship, but where heartbreak found them nonetheless.