"God created war so that americans would learn geography." Mark Twain quote. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "the Great American Novel".He was lauded as the "greatest American humorist of his age," and William Faulkner called Twain "the father of American literature".