As part of the "Tom Sawyer" Big Read campaign here in Columbus, the interim director of the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum in Hannibal, Mo., will talk tonight about Samuel Clemens' childhood and how it influenced his later classics “Tom Sawyer” and “Huck Finn.”

Clemens later took the pen name "Mark Twain," a term riverboat crews used to measure the water's depth.

Cindy Lovell, who also serves as the museum's education coordinator, will speak on "Mark Twain: The Life Behind the Fiction" at 7 tonight at the Columbus Public Library, 3000 Macon Road.

The Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum includes eight properties, six listed on the National Register of Historic Places and two interactive museums. The museum collections include 15 Norman Rockwell paintings and Mark Twain’s Oxford gown. Lovell has a bachelor's degree in elementary education and a master's in education from Stetson University. She taught elementary school before earning a doctorate in education from the University of Iowa. In 2007, she became an associate professor at Quincy University, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate education courses and a "First Year Experience" course on Mark Twain.

She has written two children’s books, "Rachel Mason Hears the Sound" and "Not this Sunday." She's now working on a two-volume encyclopedia titled "All Things Twain." “Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry” is her favorite Mark Twain quote.

For more information, call 706-243-2689.