Mark Twain ---Mirror of America Noel Grove 围棋是谁发明的
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Most Americans remember Mark Twain as the father of Huck Finn's idyllic crui through eternal boyhood and Tom Sawyer's endless summer of freedom and adventure. In-deed, this nation's best-loved author was every bit as ad-venturous, patriotic, romantic, and humorous as anyone has ever imagined. I found another Twain as well – one who grew cynical, bitter, saddened by the profound personal tragedies life dealt him, a man who became obsd with the frailties of the human race, who saw clearly ahead a black wall of night.
Tramp printer, river pilot , Confederate guerrilla, prospector, starry-eyed optimist, acid-tongued cynic: The man who became Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens and he ranged across the nation for more than a third of his life, digesting the new American experience before sharing it with the world as writer and lecturer. He adopted his pen name from the cry heard in his steamboat days, signaling two fathoms (12 feet) of wate
r -- a navigable depth. His popularity is attested by the fact that more than a score of his books remain in print, and translations are still read around the world.
The geographic core, in Twain's early years, was the great valley of the Mississippi River, main artery of transportation in the young nation's heart. Keelboats ， flatboats , and large rafts carried the first major commerce. Lumber, corn, tobacco, wheat, and furs moved downstream to the delta country; sugar, molass , cotton, and whiskey traveled north. In the 1850's, before the climax of westward expansion, the vast basin drained three-quarters of the ttled United States.
Young Mark Twain entered that world in 1857 as a cub pilot on a steamboat. The cast of characters t before him in his new profession was rich and varied a cosmos . He participated abundantly in this life, listening to pilothou talk of feuds , piracies, lynchings ,medicine shows, and savage waterside slums. All would resurface in his books, together with the colorful language that he soaked up with a memory that emed phonographic 消防常识
Steamboat decks teemed not only with the main current of pioneering humanity, but its fl
otsam of hustlers, gamblers, and thugs as well. From them all Mark Twain gained a keen perception of the human race, of the difference between what people claim to be and what they really are. His four and a half year s in the steamboat trade marked the real beginning of his education, and the most lasting part of it. In later life Twainacknowledged that the river had acquainted him with every possible type of human nature. Tho acquaintanceships strengthened all his writing, but he never wrote better than when he wrote of the people a-long the great stream.
When railroads began drying up the demand for steam-boat pilots and the Civil War halted commerce, Mark Twain left the river country. He tried soldiering for two weeks with a motleyband of Confederate guerrillas who diligently avoided contact with the enemy. Twain quit after deciding, "... I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating. "
He went west by stagecoach and succumbed to the epidemic of gold and silver fever in Nevada's Washoe region. For eight months he flirted with the colossal wealth available to the lucky and the persistent, and was rebuffed . Broke and discouraged, he accepted a jo
b as reporter with the Virginia City Territorial Enterpri, to literature's enduring gratitude.
From the discouragement of his mining failures, Mark Twain began digging his way to regional fame as a newspaper reporter and humorist. The instant riches of a mining strike would not be his in the reporting trade, but for making money, his pen would prove mightier than his pickax. In the spring of 1864, less than two years after joining the Territorial Enterpri, he boarded the stagecoach for San Francisco, then and now a hotbed of hopeful young writers.
Mark Twain honed and experimented with his new writing muscles, but he had to leave the city for a while becau of some scathing columns he wrote. Attacks on the city government, concerning such issues as mistreatment of Chine, so angered officials that he fled to the goldfields in the Sacramento Valley. His descriptions of the rough-country ttlers there ring familiarly in modern world accustomed to trend tting on the West Coast. "It was a splendid population – for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained slothsstayed It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterpris and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring
and a recklessness of cost or conquences, which she bears unto this day – and when she projects a new surpri, the grave world smiles as usual, and says 'Well, that is California all over. '"
In the dreary winter of 1864-65 in Angels Camp, he kept a notebook. Scattered among notationsabout the weather and the tedious mining-camp meals lies 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 – stranger had no frog, and C. got him one – in the meantime stranger filled C. 's frog full of shot and he couldn't jump. The stranger's frog won." Retold with his descriptive genius, the story was printed in newspapers across the United States and became known as "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Mark Twain's national reputation was now well established as "the wild humorist of the Pacific slope."个人诚信
Two year s later the opportunity came for him to take a distinctly American look at the Old World. In New York City the steamship Quaker City prepared to sail on a pleasure crui to Europe and the Holy Land. For the first time, a sizablegroup of United States citi夸耀的反义词
zens planned to journey as tourists -- a milestone , of sorts, in a country's development. Twain was assigned to accompany them, as correspondent 工for a California newspaper. If readers expected the usual glowing travelogue , they were sorely surprid.
Unimpresd by the Sultan of Turkey, for example, he reported, “... one could t a trap anywhere and catch a dozen abler men in a night.” Casually he debunked revered artists and art treasures, and took unholy verbalshots at the Holy Land. Back home, more newspapers began printing his articles. America laughed with him. Upon his return to the States the book version of his travels, The Innocents Abroad, became an instant best-ller.
At the age of 36 Twain ttled in Hartford, Connecticut. His best books were published while he lived there.赞美女生的话
As early as 1870 Twain had experimented with a story about the boyhood adventures of a lad he named Billy Rogers. Two years later, he changed the name to Tom, and began shaping his adventures into a stage play. Not until 1874 did the story begin developing in ear nest. After publication in 1876, Tom Sawyer quickly became a classic tale of America
n boyhood. Tom's mischievousdaring, ingenuity , and the sweet innocence of his affection for Becky Thatcher are almost as sure to be studied in American schools to-day as is the Declaration of Independence.
Mark Twain's own declaration of independence came from another character. Six chapters into Tom Sawyer, he drags in "the juvenile pariah of the village, Huckleberry Finn, son of the town drunkard." Fleeing a respectable life with the puritanical Widow Douglas, Huck protests to his friend, Tom Sawyer: "I've tried it, and it don't work; it don't work, Tom. It ain't for me ... The widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits up by a bell – everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't stand it."
Nine years after Tom Sawyer swept the nation, Huck was given a life of his own, in a book often consider ed the best ever written about Americans. His raft flight down the Mississippi with a runaway slave prents a moving panorama for exploration of American society.
On the river, and especially with Huck Finn, Twain found the ultimate expression of escape from the pace he lived by and often deplored, from life's regularities and the ener
gy-sapping clamorfor success.火火火木燊
Mark Twain suggested that an ingredient was missing in the American ambition when he said: "What a robustpeople, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourlves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges."
Personal tragedy haunted his entire life, in the deaths of loved ones: his father, dying of pneumonia when Sam was 12; his brother Henry, killed by a steamboat explosion; the death of his son, Langdon, at 19 months. His eldest daughter, Susy, died of spinal meningitis , Mrs. Clemens succumbed to a heart attack in Florence, and youngest daughter., Jean, an epileptic, drowned in an upstairs bathtub .
Bitterness fed on the man who had made the world laugh. The moralizing of his earlier writing had been well padded with humor. Now the gloves came off with biting satire. He pretended to prai the U. S. military for the massacre of 600 Philippine Moros in the bowl of a volcanic, crater . In The Mysterious Stranger, he insisted that man drop his religious illusions and depend upon himlf, not Providence, to make a better world.
The last of his own illusions emed to have crumbled near the end. Dictating his autobi
爱与自由ography late in life, he commented with a crushing n of despair on men's final relea from earthly struggles: "... they vanish from a 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 for-get them forever.”
