Twain Town, U.S.A.

It’s the Fourth of July 2025, in Hannibal, Missouri, and what appears to be the town’s entire population has gathered in the sweltering heat to watch the annual parade. It’s an event befitting “America’s Hometown,” as Hannibal likes to call itself. This is where Samuel Clemens—better known by his pen name, Mark Twain—grew up, and the parade is part of the annual National Tom Sawyer Days, now in its 70th year. Just about every local organization has decorated a vehicle: the Cub Scouts, the volunteer fire department, a power-washing business with the slogan “Nothing too mean for us to clean!”

The crowd erupts in cheers at the sight of a boy and girl, both age 13, who wave from a convertible. The boy wears a straw hat and a button-down shirt with a Peter Pan collar; the girl’s hair hangs in long braids underneath a bonnet that matches her ruffled dress.

They’re this year’s “Official Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher,” chosen from a pool of around 100 local seventh graders. The rigorous application process for the Tom and Becky Program, as it’s called, lasts six months and involves interviews, evaluations, and presentations in which the children demonstrate their knowledge of Twain’s works and the history of Hannibal. For the rest of the year, the selected pair will serve as tourism ambassadors, greeting visitors off riverboat cruises, strolling around the historic district and posing for pictures, and cutting ribbons around the community. “Growing up in Hannibal, that’s probably the most exciting thing you can do,” Ainsley Ahrens, who served as Becky in 2024–25, told me.

Hannibal is a company town, and the local industry is Mark Twain. Just about every location associated with his childhood has been developed into a potential source of revenue. The Mark Twain Boyhood Home, filled with memorabilia, is bordered by a whitewashed fence like the one made famous in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in which Tom, a mischief-maker whose antics range from wickedly ingenious to borderline sociopathic, tricks his friends into doing a tedious chore for him by pretending it’s fun. There’s the Mark Twain Cave—where Clemens himself played as a child and which inspired the one where Tom is trapped for three days along with Becky, his sweetheart—now electrically lit and accessible to visitors on an hour-long guided tour. The list goes on: the Mark Twain Casino, Becky’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor & Emporium, Clemens General Store, and more. Even a bottled-water vending machine bears a quote from Twain: “High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.”

Twain is a complex figure: A child of slave owners, he married into an abolitionist family and ultimately wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest works of American literature, with a deeply antiracist message. At the same time, the book has been criticized and even banned for its frequent use of the n-word and perceived racial stereotyping. The runaway success of Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James, a retelling of the Huck Finn story from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man who is Huck’s companion, shows that interest in Twain remains high even as contemporary readers increasingly acknowledge the ways in which his books inadequately represent the experience of Black people. “Part of the continuing fascination with Mark Twain is that he combines in his person both the best and the worst of our national culture,” Ron Chernow, the author of a new Twain biography, has said.

But you wouldn’t know it in Hannibal, where the perfume of manufactured nostalgia hangs heavy in the air. With their dogged focus on Tom Sawyer, a book that depicts an idealized version of Clemens’s childhood, the town’s cultural institutions avoid recognizing its history of slavery. “Mark Twain’s Hannibal is a palimpsest that yields diverse and often contradictory meanings,” Shelley Fisher Fishkin writes in Lighting Out for the Territory, her study of Twain and American culture. “It is also a microcosm of America itself—its promise and its potential, its guilt and its shame.”