Mark Twain's America Then and Now® (Then and Now)A unique biography of Mark Twain featuring the cities in America where he lived, worked and visited on his many lecture tours. Few would dispute that Mark Twain was a literary genius, a writer unique in his ability to capture the idioms of country speech, yet also write novels that appealed to the powerful East Coast literary set. He was born Samuel Clemens in Florida, Missouri, and at four years of age moved to Hannibal, on the Mississippi river.