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
Autobiography of Mark Twain four book collections of "Autobiography" material: "Mark Twain in Eruption" (1940), "The Portable Mark Twain" (1946), "Mark Twain at Work" (1952), and "Letters from the Earth" (1962). The much-delayed publication of the latter was due to objections from Clara Clemens. Two publications were made from re-arrangements of previously published work. In 1959 Charles Neider rejected both Paine's in-order-of-creation and DeVoto's arranged-by-topic approaches and rearranged material to match the chronology of a standard autobiography. In 1990 (republished February 2010) scholar Michael Kiskis edited "Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review." The Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft