Up through the crust of his personality it came: red-hot American magma, the wild innocence and overwhelming violence of a nation that was forming in his time as it is forming in ours. He suffered fits of rage and deep depression. But he also had a superpower: his literary style. It was subtle; it was ferocious; it was scornful; it was generous; it was a kind of ironic bombast. It allowed him to experience, in full, the nature of his country, and himself as a part of that nature.

And so—like a knight, like a comedian—he mantled himself in this style. He tried it on in the pages of "The Atlantic."  His persona became an expression of it: the shuffling showman in the white suit, behind mouth-obscuring whiskers, who knew exactly, intuitively, where the line was between his own extremity and the capacities of his audience. With "Huckleberry Finn," he made himself a mandarin of the vernacular: a pioneer, like Walt Whitman, of the great American monologue. The older he got, the madder he got. Elitism, herd thinking, stale piety, injustice, moral numbness—for Twain, all of these found their apotheosis in the crime of slavery. Man, he wrote, is “the only animal who enslaves.” We can say that he helped the nation come to consciousness.