浅析马克吐温艺术特点

An Analysis of Mark Twain’s Humor in Running for Governor
1. Introduction
1.1 Mark Twain and Running for Governor
Mark Twain，pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, spent his early life in the river town of Hannibal, Missouri, strategically located on the banks of the Mississippi. Before the Civil War, crowds of people arrived at the town before heading for the west. When he was twelve, his father died, and he was apprenticed to a printer. His schooling was brief. At seventeen he left home and traveled in the southwest and west for the next fifteen years, working first as a traveling printer, then as a Mississippi River pilot, and as a miner, mine speculator and journalist in Nevada.
It was in Nevada that he first used the pen name, “Mark Twain”, which spoke of his love of the Mississippi River and his river life. “Mark Twain” was always a welcome river call meaning “two fathoms” and indicating that the water was deep enough for safe passage. In Nevada, he dreamed of striking it rich, but failed.
Instead he supported himself by newspaper reporting, specializing in humorous feature stories. With the publication of his Jumping Frog story, now known as The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, the pen name “Mark Twain” soon attracted the national attention. In 1867, he traveled to Europe and the Holy Land —Palestine. The journey resulted in The Innocents Abroad(1869) which soon became a best seller.
On February 2, 1870, he married a wealthy eastern lady, Olivia Langdon, thus beginning thirty-four years of loving and extraordinarily close companionship. In 1872, his second book Roughing It, which recounted his experiences in Nevada, was published. The family settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where Mark Twain met Charles Dudley Warner and William Dean Howells, the most influential literary
critic of the day. Then he finished another work, The Gilded Age (1874) with Warner. Mark Twain’s first real novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) helped him become one of the greatest novelists America has ever produced.
Mark Twain’s later life was plagued by business disappointments and the deathsof loved ones, his oldest daughter, his wife and his youngest daughter. His works became even more sarcastic. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)was an attack on racial discrimination. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900),which made troubled inquiries into the nature of man himself, was probably the best of his powerful pessimistic tales.
The famous Chinese writer Lu X un once said that: “Not only Mark Twain’s works make people laugh, but also his pen name.”(Lu Xun, 2006: 179) As a matter of fact, Mark Twain does use humor to make readers laugh with tears. As the founder of American critical realism and famous short story writer, Mark Twain is good at humor, and almost all of his works are full of humor. His humorous language, special writing style and writing skill have attracted the people from all over the world. In American, his position as “The Lincoln of American Literature” is unshakeable. Mark Twain’s short stories are full of special humor and intelligent language. His western-based humor and slangy words had broken the limitation of the tradition literature and dug a bright new road of American literature.
Running for Governor is from Mark Twain’s early works. It was written in 1870, five years after the American Civil War. In 1865, the war came to an end. President Lyndon Baines Johnson pardoned a part of revolting slave owners and absurdly proposed “equality principle” to accept southern rebels to rejoin the federal states. At the same time, the northern speculators, the south slave owners, the infamous three-K party raged rampantly. Under the pressure of American people’s fight, the U.S. Congress passed the "reconstruction of the south", and announced a black civil rights bill; enacted amendments to the Constitution. However, writing on paper is one thing, the actual line is another. Running for Governor is produced under such a background.。