The Famous American Writer —Mark Twain
蒋巷
Mark Twain is the best loved author in the America. He is known as his typical works. As a matter of fact, this nation’s best loved author was ever bit as adventurous, patriotic, romantic, and humorous as anyone has imagined. In this article, it mainly talks about Mark Twain’s life experience s, hobbies and writing.
Early Life
激励自己的话
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835. Twain was the sixth of the ven children. But only three of them survived. His brother Orion Henry, died in a riverboat explosion and his sister Margaret died when Twain was three years old. And his brother Benjamin died three years later. Another brother, Pleasant died at six months. When Twain was four, his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a port town on the Mississippi River that inspired the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Missouri was a slave state and young Twain became familiar with the institution of slavery, a theme that he would later explore in his writing. In March 1847, when Twain was 11, his father died of pneumonia. The next year, he became a printer's apprentice. In 1851, he began working as a typetter 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. He joined the union and educated himlf in public libraries in the evenings. When he was 22 years old, he returned to Florida, Missouri.
Travels
Twain joined Orion who was the governor of Nevada Territory in 1861. Twain and his brother travelled more than two weeks on a steamboat across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, visiting the Mormon community in Salt Lake City. The experiences inspired him and provided materials for The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. Twain's journey ended in the silver-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, where he became a miner. Twain failed as a miner and accepted a job as a reporter with the Virginia City Territorial Enterpri. On February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous travel a ccount “Letter From Carson” with “Mark Twain”. After then he ud Mark Twain as his pen name.
Twain moved to San Francisco, California as a journalist in 1864. He met writers such as Bret Harte, Artemus Ward, and Hemingway. The writers had a great effect on Mark Twain.
熊猫图片大全大图His first success as a writer came out when his humorous tall tale “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was published in a New York weekly on November 18, 1865. It brought him national attention. One year later, he travelled to the Sandwich Islands (prent-day Hawaii) as a reporter for the Sacramento Union.
In 1867, a local newspaper funded a trip to the Mediterranean. During his tour of Europe and the Middle East, he wrote a popular collection of travel letters, which were adapted as The Innocents Abroad in 1869. The Innocents Abroad became an instant best-ller.
Love of science and technology
Twain was fascinated with science and scientific inquiry. He developed a clo and lasting friendship with Nikola Tesla, and the two spent much time together in Tesla's laboratory. Twain gained three inventions, including an "Improvement in Adjustable and Detachable Straps for Garments” and a history cumbersome game. Mos t of them were ud on commerce successfully. His book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court features a time traveler from contemporary America, using his knowledge of science to introduce modern
technology to Arthurian England. This type of storyline would later become a common feature of a sc
ience fiction sub-genre, alternate history.
In 1909, Thomas Edison visited Twain at his home in Redding and filmed him. Part of the footage was ud in The Prince and the Pauper (1909).
Writing
开学第一课讲话稿Twain began his career writing at 29 years old. In the winter of 1864, he kept a notebook. Scattered among notations about the weather and the tedious mining-camp meals lines an entry noting a story he had heard that day-an entry that would determine his cour forever ：“Coleman with his jumping frog-bet stranger 50 dollars. Of cour, strangers had no frogs. They gave them frogs. The stranger filled C’s frog full of shot and he could not jump. The stringer’s frog won.
At mid-career, with Huckleberry Finn, he combined rich humor and social criticism together. Twain was a master at rendering colloquial speech and helped to create and popularize a distinctive American literature. Many of Twain's works have been suppresd at times for various reasons. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been repeatedly restricted in American high schools, not least for its frequent u of the word “nigger”, whic h was in common usage in the pre-Civil War period in which the novel was t.
A complete reference of his works is nearly impossible to work out becau of the vast number of pieces written by Twain (often in vague newspapers) and his u of veral different pen names. In addition, a large portion of his speeches and lectures have been lost or were not written down; thus, the collection of Twain's works is an endless process. Rearchers rediscovered published material by Twain as recently as 1995.
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
Twain's next major publication was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which drew on his youth in Hannibal. Tom Sawyer was modeled on Twain himlf as a child, with traces of two schoolmates, John Briggs and Will Bowen. The book also introduced in a supporting role Huckleberry Finn, bad on Twain's boyhood friend Tom Blankenship.
The Prince and the Pauper is still not well received today. It mainly tells the story of two boys born on the same day who are physically identical. The book acts as a social commentary as the prince and pauper switch places. Pauper was Twain's first attempt at historical fiction. While the writing of Pauper, Twain had started Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and completed another travel book, A Tramp Abroad, which reprents Twain as he traveled through central and southern Europe.
Twain's next major published work, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, supported him as a noteworthy American writer. Some have called it the first Great American Novel, and the book has become required reading in many schools throughout the United States. Huckleberry Finn was the other characteristic from Tom Sawyer and had a more rious tone than its Tom Sawyer. The main premi behind Huckleberry Finn is the young boy's belief in the right thing to do, though most believed that it was wrong. Four hundred manuscript pages of Huckleberry Finn were written in mid-1876, following the publication of Tom Sawyer. Some accounts have Twain taking ven years off after his first burst of creativity, eventually finishing the book in 1883. Other accounts have Twain working on Huckleberry Finn in tandem with The Prince and the Pauper and other works in 1880 and other years. The last fifth of Huckleberry Finn is subject to much controversy. Some say that Twain experienced, as critic Leo Marx puts it, “a failure of nerve”. Ernest Hemingway once said of Huckleberry Finn:
If you read it, you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating.
Hemingway also wrote in the same essay:
肉的营养价值
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Near the completion of Huckleberry Finn, Twain wrote Life on the Mississippi, which is said to have heavily influenced the former book. The work recounts Twain's memories and new experiences after a 22-year abnce from the Mississippi. In the book, he also states that "Mark Twain" was the call made when the boat was in safe water – the cry heard in his steamboat days, signaling two fathoms (12 feet) of water-a navigable depth.
非应届毕业生Conclusion
电视网购The last of his own illusions emed to have crumbled near the world. Dictating his autobiography late in the life, he commented with a crushing n of despair on man’s final relea from earthly struggles:“They vanish from the world where they were of no conquence; 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.”
References
1.马克.吐温中短篇故事全集[M] 石家庄：河北教育出版社，2000.1.
早安心语正能量一句话
2.张汗熙. Advanced English(Book 1) [M] 北京：外语教学与研究出版社，2010.6, 150-156.
3. Mark Twain. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer [M] 石家庄：河北教育出版社，2000.1.
4．Mark Twain. The ＄1,000,000 Bank Note and Other Stories [M] 南京：译林出版社，2008.6
