Mark Twain three of his siblings survived childhood: Orion (1825–1897), Henry (1838–1858), and Pamela (1827–1904). His sister Margaret (1830–1839) died when Twain was three, and his brother Benjamin (1832–1842) died three years later. His brother Pleasant Hannibal (1828) died at three weeks of age. When he was four, Twain's family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a port town on the Mississippi River that inspired the fictional town of St. Petersburg in "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and the "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". Slavery was legal in Missouri at the time, and it became a theme in these writings. His father was an attorney
Mark Twain Soviet propaganda about the withholding. The anti-religious "The Mysterious Stranger" was published in 1916. "Little Bessie", a story ridiculing Christianity, was first published in the 1972 collection "Mark Twain's Fables of Man". He raised money to build a Presbyterian Church in Nevada in 1864. Twain created a reverent portrayal of Joan of Arc, a subject over which he had obsessed for forty years, studied for a dozen years and spent two years writing about. In 1900 and again in 1908 he stated, "I like "Joan of Arc" best of all my books, it is the best". Those who knew Twain