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 in Nevada was "A work, apparently, of Twain's comic imagination". Historians Forrest Glen Robinson and Leland Krauth also view these accounts as highly fictionalized reconstructions, "portraying Clemens as much less the fool and the coward than he was in fact. For example, not once is there mention of his editorial reference to the 'miscegenation society'". Krauth sees it as an example that "illuminate[s] the process whereby Mark Twain characteristically purged through his art that which was painful and humiliating in Sam Clemen's past," by "purging drunkenness, sex, and violence" while he "imposes on the whole of "Roughing It" a posture of propriety".