Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He is most noted for his novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "the Great American Novel."

Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which would later provide the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. He apprenticed with a printer. He also worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to his older brother Orion's newspaper. After toiling as a printer in various cities, he became a master riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River, before heading west to join Orion. He was a failure at gold mining, so he next turned to journalism. While a reporter, he wrote a humorous story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", which became very popular and brought nationwide attention. His travelogues were also well-received. Twain had found his calling.

He achieved great success as a writer and public speaker. His wit and satire earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.

Kenneth Lauren "Ken" Burns (born July 29, 1953) is an American director and producer of documentary films, known for his style of using archival footage and photographs. Among his productions are The Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Jazz (2001), The War (2007), The National Parks: America's Best Idea (2009) and Prohibition (2011).

Burns' documentaries have been nominated for two Academy Awards, and have won Emmy Awards, among other honors.

Ken Burns was born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, according to his official website, though some sources give Ann Arbor, Michigan, and some, including The New York Times, give both Brooklyn and Ann Arbor. The son of Lyla Smith (née Tupper) Burns, a biotechnician, and Robert Kyle Burns, at the time a graduate student in cultural anthropology at Columbia University, in Manhattan. Ken Burns' brother is the documentary filmmaker Ric Burns.

Burns' academic family moved frequently, and lived in Saint-Véran, France; Newark, Delaware; and Ann Arbor, where his father taught at the University of Michigan. Burns' mother was diagnosed with breast cancer when Burns was 3, and died when he was 11, a circumstance that he said helped shape his career; he credited his father-in-law, a psychologist, with a signal insight: "He told me that my whole work was an attempt to make people long gone come back alive.". Well-read as a child, he absorbed the family encyclopedia, preferring history to fiction. Upon receiving an 8 mm film movie camera for his 17th birthday, he shot a documentary about an Ann Arbor factory. Turning down reduced tuition at the University of Michigan, he attended the new Hampshire College, an alternative school in Amherst, Massachusetts with narrative evaluations rather than letter grades and self-directed academic concentrations instead of traditional majors. He worked in a record store to pay his tuition.