Mark Twain Memorial Bridge (1936) Mark Twain Memorial Bridge (1936) The Mark Twain Memorial Bridge was a Cantilevered Through Truss Bridge carrying US 36 over the Mississippi River. It was replaced in 2000 with the extension of I-72 and subsequently demolished. The bridge, which replaced motor vehicle use of the Wabash Bridge, was opened in 1936 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and entered Missouri at the foot of Cardiff Hill which appeared in Twain's books The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A crosswalk crossed the highway, connecting the Twain boyhood home with the lighthouse at the top of the hill.
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".