Lecture 8

He pointed towards his uneasy acceptance of the values of nineteenth-century American society, In later works he expressed his acute pessimism. From that time until his death, he maintained a bitter skepticism, relieved at times by outraged commentary on world affairs. His last years were saddened by personal bereavement.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn


a novel first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885. Commonly named among the Great American Novels, the work is among the first in major American literature to be written throughout in vernacular English, characterized by local color regionalism.
His Life and Career



Twain was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, two weeks after a visit by Halley's Comet. He predicted that he would "go out with it," too. When he was four, Twain's 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. In 1847, when Twain was 11, his father died of pneumonia. The next year, he became a printer's apprentice.



Twain was a master at rendering colloquial speech and helped to create and popularize a distinctive American literature built on American themes and language. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) are his most famous novels. Especially, Huck Finn solidified him as a noteworthy American writer. Some have called it the first Great American Novel. Ernest Hemingway once said of Huckleberry Finn: All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.



Twain's writings and lectures, combined with the help of a new friend, enabled him to recover financially. To pay off his creditors in full, Twain embarked on a year-long, around-the-world lecture tour in July 1895. He then returned to America in 1900, having earned enough to pay off his debts. Twain passed through a period of deep depression that began in 1896 when his daughter Susy died of meningitis (脑膜炎). Olivia's death in 1904 and Jean's on December 24, 1909, deepened his gloom. His prediction that he would go out with Halley’s Comet was accurate—Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut, one day after the comet's closest approach to Earth.
American Literature
Lecture 8
Mark Twain (1835-1910)



Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain an American author and humorist ―the father of American literature‖ (William Faulkner)


In 1851, he began working 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. On a voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi, steamboat pilot Horace E. Bixby inspired Twain to become a pilot himself. This occupation gave him his pen name, Mark Twain, from "mark twain," the cry for a measured river depth of two fathoms (12 feet or 3.7 mቤተ መጻሕፍቲ ባይዱters), a depth indicating safe water for passage of boat. He continued to work on the river and was a river pilot until the American Civil War broke out in 1861.



During his seventeen years in Hartford (1874– 1891) and over twenty summers at Quarry Farm, Twain wrote many of his classic novels, among them The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). Twain made a second tour of Europe, described in the 1880 book A Tramp Abroad. Twain made a substantial amount of money through his writing, but he lost a great deal through investments, mostly in new inventions and technology.


In 1861, Twain headed west to search a new career. His experiences in the American West inspired Roughing It and provided material for "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County―, his first success as a writer, which was published in 1865 and brought him national attention. 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 later compiled as The Innocents Abroad in 1869. It was on this trip that he met his future brother-in-law, Charles Langdon, whose sister Olivia fell in love with Twain and was married to him. Their marriage lasted 34 years, until Olivia's death in 1904. They had one son (died at age 19 months) and three daughters.