Hannibal

City and port in northeastern Missouri, USA, on the Mississippi River, 160 km/99 mi northwest of St Louis; population (2000) 17,800. It is a centre for railway and river traffic, and trades in agricultural and dairy products, cement, steel, chemicals, machinery and other metal goods. Mark Twain lived here as a boy and made it the setting for his novels The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Hannibal was first settled in 1819 and incorporated as a city in 1845. It is the seat of Hannibal-La Grange College (1858). Molly Brown, a survivor of the Titanic and heroine of the musical comedy The Unsinkable Molly Brown, was born here.