Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 in the relatively humble small-town settings of Florida, Missouri, Mark Twain can undoubtedly be seen as one of the most famous and enduring names in American literary history. Prior to the publication of his first novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain was renowned for his witty and satirical short stories. As an anti-imperialist who briefly served as a soldier during the American Civil War, Twain clearly felt strongly about this issue, and we will see that he divulges this through his short stories that pertain to war. Twain was also strongly opposed to slavery, and the oppression of African Americans. Indeed, he helped pay for a promising young African-American student to attend law school at Yale University, and in a letter to the dean dated 1885, he wrote that "I do not believe I would very cheerfully help a white student who would ask a benevolence of a stranger, but I do not feel so about the other color. We have ground the manhood out of them, and the shame is ours, not theirs, and we should pay for it."
             Furthermore, Twain's short stories have also been the subject of much debate regarding their shifting representation of gender roles. Author J.D Stahl studied this in his book Mark Twain, Culture and Gender, asserting that Twain reveals "the merging of sexual anxiety and cultural anxiety. Economic power was a less equivocal symbol of American confidence than sexual maturity, yet both the confidence of American purchasing power and his fears about courtship provided the young American male author with material to dramatize what it meant for him to confront, challenge, and incorporate European culture in an extended act of declaration of American identity." The aim of this essay is to examine Twain's representations of slavery, war and gender, the ways in which he addresses these issues, and the literary techniques he uses to make a certain impact on t...