|
by eliterature.com
American writer, journalist, humorist, who won a worldwide audience for
his stories of youthful adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
Sensitive to the sound of language, Twain introduced colloquial speech
into American fiction. In Green Hills of Africa, Ernest Hemingway wrote:
"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called
Huckleberry Finn..."
"When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades
in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be
a steamboatman." (from Old Times on the Mississippi, 1875)
Clemens
was born in Florida, Missouri, of a Virginian family. He was brought up in
Hannibal, Missouri. After his father's death in 1847, Twain was
apprenticed to a printer and wrote for his brother's newspaper. Twain
worked later as a licensed Mississippi river-boat pilot (1857-61),
adopting his name from the call ('Mark twain!' - meaning by the mark of
two fathoms) used when sounding river shallows. The Civil War put an end
to the steamboat traffic and Clemens moved to Virginia City, where he
edited two years Territorial Enterprise. On February 3, 1863, 'Mark Twain'
was born when he signed a humorous travel account with that pseudonym.
In 1864 Twain left for California, and worked in San Francisco as a
reporter. He visited Hawaii as a correspondent for The Sacramento Union,
publishing letters on his trip and giving lectures. He set out world tour,
traveling in France and Italy. His experiences were recorded in 1869 in
The Innocents Abroad, which gained him wide popularity, and poked fun
at both American and European prejudices and manners.
His success as a writer gaveTwain enough financial security to marry
Olivia Langdon in 1870. They moved next year to Hartford. Twain continued
to lecture in the United States and England. Between 1876 and 1884 he
published several masterpieces, Tom Sawyer (1881), which the author
originally intended for adults, and The Prince and the Pauper
(1881), in which Edward VI of England and a little pauper change places.
Life on the Mississippi (1883) contained an attack on the
influence of Sir Walter Scott, whose romanticism have caused according to
Twain 'measureless harm' to progressive ideas. From the very beginning of
his journalistic career, Twain made fun with the novel and its tradition.
He believed that he lacked the analytical sensibility necessary to the
novelist's art, although he enjoyed magnificent popularity as a novelist.
He frequently returned to travel writing - many of his finest novels were
thinly veiled travelogues.
Huckleberry Finn (1884) was first considered adult fiction. Huck
Finn, which painted a picture of Mississippi frontier life, was intended
as a sequel to Tom Sawyer. Huck, who could not possibly write a story,
tells us the story. Both works stand high on the list of eminent writers
like Stevenson, Dickens, and Saroyan who honestly depicted young people
without any condescension or moralizing. Huck's distaste for civilization
reflects the ideas of Walden, and his debate whether or not he will turn
in Jim, an escaped slave and a friend, probed the racial tensions of the
national conscience. Later Twain wrote in The Man That Corrupted
Hadleyburg (1900): "I have no race prejudices... All that I care to
know is that a man is a human being - that is enough for me; he can't be
any worse."
One of Twain's major achievements is the way he narrates Huckleberry Finn,
following the twists and turns of ordinary speech, his native Missouri
dialect. Shelley Fisher Fishkin has noted in Was Huck Black? (1993) that
the book drew upon a vernacular formed by black voices as well as white.
The model for Huck Finn's voice, according to Fishkin, was a black child
instead of a white one. Huck, himself, was drawn a boy named Tom
Blankenship.
'"Who is your folks?" he questions me.
"The Phelpses, down yonder."
"Oh," he says, "how'd you say he got shot?"
"He had a dream," I says, "and it shot him."
"Funny dream," the doctor says.'
(from Huckleberry Finn)
In the
1890s Twain lost most of his earnings in financial speculations and in the
downhill of his own publishing firm. To recover from his bankruptcy, he
started a world lecture tour, during which one of his daughters died.
Twain toured New Zealand, Australia, India, and South Africa, and returned
to the U.S. He wrote such books as The Tragedy of Pudd'head Willson
(1884), a murder mystery and a case of transposed identities, but also an
implicit condemnation of a society that allows slavery, Personal
Recollections of Joan of Arc (1885), and the travel book Following
the Equator (1897).
The death of his wife and his second daughter darkened the author's later
years, which is also seen in writings and his posthumously published
autobiography (1924). Twain died on April 21, 1910. He dictated his
autobiography during his last years to his secretary A.B. Paine, and
various versions of it have been published. In 1916 appeared The
Mysterious Stranger, set in 16th-century Austria, in which Satan
reveals the hypocrisies and stupidities of the village of Eselddorf.
"If men neglected 'God's poor' and 'God's stricken and helpless ones' as
He does, what would become of them? The answer is to be found in those
dark lands where man follows His example and turns his indifference back
upon them: they get no help at all; they cry, and plead and pray in vain,
they linger and suffer, and miserably die." (from Thoughts of God)
During
his long writing career, Twain produced a considerable number of essays.
His essays appeared in various newspapers and in magazines, including the
Galaxy, Harper's, the Atlantic Monthly, and North American Review. In his
Sandwich Islands letters (1873) Twain described how the
missionaries and American government corrupted the Hawaiians, Queen
Victoria's Jubilee (1897) presented the pomp and pageantry of an
English royal procession, and King Leopold's Soliloquy (1905)
revealed in a dramatic monologue the political evils caused by despotism.
Twain's finest satire of imperialism was perhaps To the Person Sitting
in Darkness (1901), in which the author wrote that the people in
darkness are beginning to see "more light than... was profitable for us."
Return to
Table of Contents
|
