Twain Town, U.S.A.

It’s the Fourth of July 2025, in Hannibal, Missouri, and what appears to be the town’s entire population has gathered in the sweltering heat to watch the annual parade. It’s an event befitting “America’s Hometown,” as Hannibal likes to call itself. This is where Samuel Clemens—better known by his pen name, Mark Twain—grew up, and the parade is part of the annual National Tom Sawyer Days, now in its 70th year. Just about every local organization has decorated a vehicle: the Cub Scouts, the volunteer fire department, a power-washing business with the slogan “Nothing too mean for us to clean!” The crowd erupts in cheers at the sight of a boy and girl, both age 13, who wave from a convertible. The boy wears a straw hat and a button-down shirt with a Peter Pan collar; the girl’s hair hangs in long braids underneath a bonnet that matches her ruffled dress. They’re this year’s “Official Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher,” chosen from a pool of around 100 local seventh graders. The rigorous application process for the Tom and Becky Program, as it’s called, lasts six months and involves interviews, evaluations, and presentations in which the children demonstrate their knowledge of Twain’s works and the history of Hannibal. For the rest of the year, the selected pair will serve as tourism ambassadors, greeting visitors off riverboat cruises, strolling around the historic district and posing for pictures, and cutting ribbons around the community. “Growing up in Hannibal, that’s probably the most exciting thing you can do,” Ainsley Ahrens, who served as Becky in 2024–25, told me. Hannibal is a company town, and the local industry is Mark Twain. Just about every location associated with his childhood has been developed into a potential source of revenue. The Mark Twain Boyhood Home, filled with memorabilia, is bordered by a whitewashed fence like the one made famous in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in which Tom, a mischief-maker whose antics range from wickedly ingenious to borderline sociopathic, tricks his friends into doing a tedious chore for him by pretending it’s fun.

There’s the Mark Twain Cave—where Clemens himself played as a child and which inspired the one where Tom is trapped for three days along with Becky, his sweetheart—now electrically lit and accessible to visitors on an hour-long guided tour. The list goes on: the Mark Twain Casino, Becky’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor & Emporium, Clemens General Store, and more. Even a bottled-water vending machine bears a quote from Twain: “High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.” Twain is a complex figure: A child of slave owners, he married into an abolitionist family and ultimately wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is generally acknowledged as one of the greatest works of American literature, with a deeply antiracist message. At the same time, the book has been criticized and even banned for its frequent use of the n-word and perceived racial stereotyping. The runaway success of Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James, a retelling of the Huck Finn story from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man who is Huck’s companion, shows that interest in Twain remains high even as contemporary readers increasingly acknowledge the ways in which his books inadequately represent the experience of Black people. “Part of the continuing fascination with Mark Twain is that he combines in his person both the best and the worst of our national culture,” Ron Chernow, the author of a new Twain biography, has said. But you wouldn’t know it in Hannibal, where the perfume of manufactured nostalgia hangs heavy in the air. With their dogged focus on Tom Sawyer, a book that depicts an idealized version of Clemens’s childhood, the town’s cultural institutions avoid recognizing its history of slavery. “Mark Twain’s Hannibal is a palimpsest that yields diverse and often contradictory meanings,” Shelley Fisher Fishkin writes in Lighting Out for the Territory, her study of Twain and American culture. “It is also a microcosm of America itself—its promise and its potential, its guilt and its shame.” Much of today’s Hannibal, like the Walmart just off the highway or the sports bar showing a Cardinals game on its big screen, would be alien to Mark Twain.

But as a skilled and shameless promoter of his own work—he liked to advertise his lectures with lines like, “The trouble begins at eight o’clock”—he would recognize, and likely admire, the strenuous marketing around his own persona. Hannibal’s main commercial area, which occupies just a few blocks along Main Street and Third Street, offers a mix of blatant tourist traps and businesses catering more to locals. Famous lines spoken by Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Jim, with images of the characters, are printed on banners that hang from street lamps. Tom’s quote is from the whitewashing episode: “Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?” Just up the hill, a giant root beer mug advertising the Mark Twain Dinette rotates during the restaurant’s opening hours. It’s July 2, and I’m headed to Java Jive, which calls itself “the first coffee shop west of the Mississippi” (the river is a block away). The wall is plastered with photographs of past Toms and Beckys and a picture of the site as it was 50 years ago. Now the café occupies two long, narrow rooms painted peach and decorated with lava lamps and original artwork by local artists (for sale). There’s a huge menu of sugary drinks, as well as assorted tchotchkes that wouldn’t be out of place in my Brooklyn neighborhood: a desk sign featuring a Taylor Swift lyric, a sippy cup that reads, “I like big cups & I cannot lie.” I’m here to meet Ellie Locke, who was the official Becky Thatcher in 2016–17 and just graduated from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. She’s working a summer job near the Lake of the Ozarks but is back in Hannibal for Tom Sawyer Days. “My dad is the youngest of nine, my mom is one of three, my grandpa was one of seven, and my grandmother one of seven or eight. And they’re all very close-knit still,” she explains over a lemonade. Like all students in Hannibal, Locke was assigned The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in her seventh-grade English class. “Partly to learn about the story, but also for the history of Mark Twain,” she says.

Her cousins had been participating in the Tom and Becky Program for years, and she always knew she wanted to be a part of it. At age three, when she was supposed to be napping, her parents discovered her in the living room giving a speech, as if she were trying out for Becky. The speech is the first hurdle in the process. Each would-be Tom or Becky has to speak for five to 10 minutes to a group of judges, as well as the current year’s official couple, about why he or she would make a good ambassador for the town. Twenty-four semifinalists—12 girls and 12 boys—will spend the next few months studying for a test “on everything Mark Twain, Hannibal, tourism, the book,” Locke explains. After the test and an interview to assess the contestants’ knowledge and people skills, the group is narrowed down to 10 finalists. “Which is when the costumes come into play,” Locke says. For the Toms, the costume is relatively simple: a button-down shirt, a pair of pants, moccasins, and a big straw hat. For the Beckys, it’s an elaborate affair that can cost well over $1,000. “You start with your pantaloons,” Annie Webb, one of this year’s Becky finalists, tells me later that afternoon at Mark Twain Elementary School, where her mother, Katie, is the music teacher. A vivacious 13-year-old who attends Hannibal Middle School, Annie has long light brown hair and green eyes. Today she’s wearing a floral tank jumpsuit and earrings with Becky charms, but she has brought her entire Becky outfit to show me. The ritual begins with a visit to the Hickory Stick, a fabric store in the center of town, where the proprietor helps each girl pick out material for her dress and then stows it away to prevent duplication. Annie’s is red with tiny white dots, accented with navy blue trim and yards of white lace. Atop the pantaloons comes a crinoline—“a pouffy layer that poufs everything up.” Next is an apron-style overskirt, which may be split at the back to reveal the layers of ruffles underneath. The outfit is topped off with a matching bonnet, parasol, and handbag. The entire getup is custom-made by a seamstress.

Each Tom and Becky carries a bag filled with items that represent moments from the book or aspects of their characters that they’ve invented. The kids, who must be in character at all times while performing, use the objects as props to help them tell stories. Annie carries an old-fashioned cup-and-ball game and a string with 99 buttons on it. The story goes that the boy who gives a girl her 100th button will be her true love. “I’m kind of hoping Tom might give me my 100th button,” she says, in character. Are these modern girls ever frustrated by Becky’s secondary status to Tom? “In the books, you don’t really hear about Becky having anything in her bag,” admits Koryn Miller, a poised 16-year-old who was the official Becky in 2022–23. But they tend to see Becky’s blankness as an opportunity rather than a limitation. “It gave me room to create this character in my head of how I think she should have been brought to life,” Koryn says. “You get to really make her your own.” Although one boy and one girl will be chosen as the official Tom and Becky, there are so many events requiring their presence that the eight other finalists will also be pressed into regular service over the course of the year. Though they always perform in pairs, the kids rotate: The official Tom might be matched with a Becky finalist, or vice versa. “Being a Tom, it’s always on the spot,” says Mason McIntyre, a garrulous teenager who was a Tom finalist in 2023–24. “There’s a lot of history in Hannibal because Mark Twain was a very big part of modern-day literature,” she says, speaking rather formally. “It’s a very homey place. We want people to feel welcome whenever they come to Hannibal.” I’m visiting him and his sister Malaina, an incoming Becky, at their grandparents’ home in a tony neighborhood high on a hill northwest of downtown. There’s a model of the Robert E. Lee riverboat on the table in front of us and an antique gramophone in the corner. Mason, who speaks very quickly with a heavy Southern accent, wants to quiz me on life in New York City. He’s most curious about the subway. “So you don’t drive anywhere? …