Mark Twain 09

Mark Twain 09 Twain’s life and career Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who was born on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri. He was the sixth of seven children. Four of his six siblings died before reaching the age of twenty, leaving only his eldest brother Orion (1825-1897) and their sister Pamela (1827-1904). In 1839, the family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a port town on the Mississippi, which was to become the setting for many of his novels. Twain’s father was a local lawyer and merchant, who died of pneumonia in 1847. Twain left school the next year to become a printer’s apprentice. In 1851, he began to work as a typesetter and contributor of articles and humorous sketches for the Hannibal Journal, a newspaper owned by his brother, Orion. When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Cincinnati. In 1857, at 22, he returned to Missouri and then decided to seek his fortune in South America. But on his voyage down the Mississippi to New Orleans, he changed his mind and became a steamboat pilot instead. The following four and a half years on the steamboat marked the real beginning of his education, and the most lasting part of it. He met all kinds of people and listened to all kinds of tales, legends and anecdotes. This experience gave him a keen perception of humanity; all he saw and heard on the boat would reappear in his books, together with the colorful language that he soaked up with his photographic memory. It was also from his job on the boat that he got the idea of using “Mark Twain” for his pen name. It was a nautical term used by sailors, signifying two fathoms (12 feet)—a navigable depth of water. When the Civil War broke out, river trade stopped. Twain became a Confederate guerrilla in 1861, fighting for the South, for Missouri was a Southern state at that time. He served only two weeks in the militia and then went west to Nevada and California, where he first became a silver miner and then, after this attempt failed, began his career as a journalist. In 1863 he first adopted the name “Mark Twain.” In 1865 he published his first important work, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, which made him popular across the country. In 1866, he went to New York, still working for the California newspapers. In 1867, he was sent by a newspaper to travel to Europe and the Holy Land with a group of New England religious people. He wrote a series of travelogues for the newspaper, which were later published under the title Innocents Abroad (1869). In 1870 he married Olivia Langdon, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, and the next year moved his family to Hartford, Connecticut. His best books were written while they lived there. Twain established his reputation as a popular writer and lecturer early, yet personal tragedy haunted his entire life, particularly in the deaths of loved ones. His father and four siblings died when he was young. His son, Langdon, died at 19 months in 1872. His earnings as an author and lecturer were enormous, but unwise investments kept him in financial difficulties. In 1891 the Twain family moved to Europe where living was cheaper and they stayed there for four years. In 1894, Twain was forced to declare bankruptcy. 1 Although he was able to pay off all his debts and build up a substantial fortune again through his lectures across the world in 1895 and 1896, his gloom was deepened by more deaths in the family: his eldest daughter, Susy, died in 1896, his wife died in 1904, and his youngest daughter, Jean, died in 1909. His sense of despair is best revealed in his unfinished autobiography when he comments on the fate of men, “…they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence; where they achieved nothing; where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness; where they have left no sign that they had existed—a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever.” He spent his last years of his life in Redding, Connecticut, and died on April 21, 1910. Twain was a prolific writer. He wrote many volumes during his long literary career, including The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), The Gilded Age (1873), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1882), Life on the Mississippi (1883), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). The most widely known of them are Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Besides the above-mentioned works, Twain’s short story “The ?1,000,000 Bank-Note” is also well-known. Twain was a great realist. Traveling more than a third of his lifetime, he drew heavily from his rich knowledge of people and places in his writing. He confined himself to the life he was familiar with and presented it in a realistic manner, together with his fanciful imagination. His contribution to literary realism particularly lies in the fact that he caught the “local color” of the American West. He felt that a novelist should write about certain places and certain people he knew well, rather than try to generalize about a country. And he portrayed uniquely American and regional subjects in a colloquial yet poetic language. The success of Huck Finn made colloquial speech an accepted, respectable medium in American literature, and made books before it and after it quite different. Twain is known for his wit and humor, often regarded as “America’s best humorist.” In his early journalisms and travelogues he used his sharp wit and comic exaggeration to attack the false pride and self-importance he saw in humanity. His humor peaked in Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, where the situations, characters and speeches are comic enough to make the most serious reader laugh. Twain was a serious social critic, too. All his life he sympathized with the oppressed people and advocated brotherhood of man. He fought corruption, privilege and abuse wherever he found them. He attacked slavery, supported workers, advocated for women’s rights and spoke for the Jews and Native Americans. He bitterly criticized the capitalist society where money was everything and attacked America’s imperialism abroad, in the Spanish-American War, in the Philippines, South Africa and China. To sum up, Mark Twain realistically portrayed American and regional subjects in a humorous and colloquial style, from highly critical viewpoints. His adherence to American themes, settings, and language set him apart from many other novelists of the day and had a powerful effect on later American writers such as Ernest 2 Hemingway (who once said “All modern literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn”) and William Faulkner (who called Twain “the father of American literature,” “the first truly American writer”), both of whom pointed to Twain as an inspiration for their own writing. 3