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Mark Twain
A merican
writer, journalist, humorist, who won a worldwide audience for his stories
of youthful adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. |
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Entire
Novel ONLINE for your reading enjoyment!
Mark Twain:
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.
"I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was
disappointed in the monkey."
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, travelling 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.
The success as a writer gave Twain 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 the bankrupt, 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 WILSON (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 the 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 have 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."
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