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Mark Twain

Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was an American novelist, comedian, editor, lecturer, and entrepreneur who wrote under the pen name Mark Twain. He was acclaimed as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced", and William Faulkner referred to him as "the pioneer of American literature." The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its adoption, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which has been labelled the "Great American Novel" numerous times, were among his works.

After taking lessons as a Mississippi River steamboat pilot, he headed west to join Orion in Nevada. His inability in mining and shift to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise was criticised. His funny story, "The Famous Dancing Frog of Calaveras Country," was initially published in 1865 and was based on a story he witnessed at the Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California, where he previously worked as a digger. He went bankrupt in the middle of these fiscal difficulties, but with Henry Huttleston Rogers' support, he finally won the case. He was relieved of this responsibility by his bankruptcy, but in the end, he paid all of his creditors in full. Paid out all of his creditors in full.

Early Life

The birth of Samuel Langhorne Clemens took place on 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. He was the sixth of Jane and John Marshall Clemens' seven children; Jane was from Kentucky, and he was originally from Virginia. His parents first bonded when his father came to Missouri. In 1823, they got hitched. Twain's ancestry included Cornish, English, and Scots-Irish. Only Orion, Pamela, and Henry could live their childhoods and reach adulthood. At the ages of three weeks, three months, and three years, respectively, Twain's sister Margaret, brother Pleasant Hannibal, and brother Benjamin all passed away.

The basis for the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was the port town on the Mississippi River called Hannibal. The family of Mark Twain came to Hannibal, Missouri, when he was four years old. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, the fictional city of St. Petersburg was based on the Mississippi River port city of Hannibal. When he was four years old, Twain's family relocated to Hannibal, Missouri. Hannibal is a Mississippi River port city that served as the model for the fictional St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. At the time of these texts, slavery was legal in Missouri, and it developed into a motif. In the evenings, he educated himself in public libraries where he could access a broader range of information than in a traditional classroom.

In his account of his early years, Life on the Mississippi, Twain writes that among his friends, "there was just one consistent ambition"-to become a steamboat captain. The most prestigious post was pilot. Even in those days of pitiful compensation, the pilot received a luxurious income of between $150 and $250 per month, and no board was to be paid. The status of the pilot was greater than that of the captain, according to Twain. In addition, the pilot "must... know in which these items are in the dark" and "gain a deeply felt ongoing relationship with every historic tree, one-limbed cottonwood, and cryptic wood pile that adorn the shores of this riverbank for twelve hundred miles." Horace E., a steamboat captain

Bixby recruited Twain as a cub pilot for $500, which Twain repaid Bixby as his first payment after completing training him on how and where to fly the river through New Orleans and St. Louis. The two stayed friends until Clemens crossed the river, acknowledged their understanding and appreciation of one another, and continued to communicate for an extremely long period. Henry, Henry's younger brother, was convinced to join Samuel in his training, and Samuel even got him a job as a mud clerk on the steamer Pennsylvania. Henry suffered injuries in a steamboat boiler explosion on June 13, 1858, and died on June 21. Twain, a prominent participant in the Society for Aid in the process Inquiry, claimed to have had a dream a month prior, 275, which foreshadowed this demise and sparked his attention to cognitive science.

Marriage and Children

Throughout 1868, Twain and Olivia Langdon exchanged letters. They got wedded in Elmira, New York, in February 1870, where he courted her and won her father's initial misgivings after she snubbed his first marriage proposal. He met activists, socialists, conscientious atheists, and rebels for women's rights and social justice through her. These individuals comprised Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, and utopian socialist novelist Dean Howells, who went on to become a long time friend. She belonged from a "rich but liberal background." The Clemens got acquainted with David Gray and his wife Martha, who've been publishers for the dueling Buffalo CourierIn a later article, Twain lamented that laboring for a newspaper was a squander of Gray's "delicate talent for poetry" and asserted that the Grays provided him and Livy with "all the comfort" they might obtain during their "sorrowful and tragic little time in Buffalo."

The nine members of the crew of the British barque Charles Ward who were still alive were rescued by the Cunard Line steamship Batavia in November 1872 when Mark Twain was a traveler on board. Twain was there for the rescues and suggested in a message to the Royal Humane Society that they acknowledge the crew of the lifeboat in addition to the captain of the Batavia. Beginning in 1873, Twain brought his family to Hartford, Connecticut, where he supervised the erection of a property next to Stowe's. And Susan did not want him to smoke cigars in her home because he did it all the time.

Twain wrote many classic novels during his 17 years in Hartford and over 20 summers at Quarry Farm. They include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, Life on the Mississippi, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

Love for Science and Technology

Science and the quest for knowledge fascinated Twain. His bond with Nikola Tesla became more profound over time, and the two spent a great deal of time within the inventor's laboratory. Twain pioneered in establishing fingerprinting as a forensic technique, utilising it as the foundation for a fake tale in Living on the Mississippi and as the main narrative in Pudd'nhead Wilson. Twain resided at Stormfield in Redding, Connecticut, wherein Thomas Edison gave him a visit in 1909 and took a film of him. The Prince and the Pauper, a two-reel short film, used some of the footage.

Death

Twain lived in his later years at 14 West 10th Street in Manhattan. He went through a deep depression in 1896 when his daughter Susy died of meningitis. Olivia's death in 1904 and Jean's on 24 December 1909 deepened his despondency. On May 20, 1909, his close friend Henry Rogers died suddenly. In April 1906, he heard that his friend Ina Coolbrith had lost almost everything she owned in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and offered some signed portrait photographs to be sold for her benefit. To further help Coolbrith, George Wharton James visited Twain in New York and arranged a new portrait session. He was initially resistant but eventually admitted that four of the resulting images were the best he had ever taken.

In September, Twain began publishing chapters from his autobiography in the North American Review. That same year, Charlotte Teller, a writer living with her grandmother at 3 Fifth Avenue, had an acquaintance with him that "lasted several years and may have involved romantic intentions" on his part. In 1901 Twain received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Yale University and a Doctor of Law from the University of Missouri and Oxford University in 1902 and 1907, respectively.

He was born two weeks after Halley's Comet's closest approach. In 1909 he said that "I came with Halley's Comet in 1835. It will come again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the biggest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's comet." He died on April 21, 1910, due to a heart attack one day after the comet's closest approach.

Mark Twain has given genuine intellectual pleasure to millions of people, and his works will continue to provide such pleasant satisfactory humour to Americans. Still, the English and people of other countries appreciated it almost as much as his own. It became a permanent part of American literature.

His Writing Style

Humour, a compelling story, vivid descriptions, and a masterful command of colloquial English are all hallmarks of Mark Twain's writing style. As a comedian, writer, and author of novels, Mark Twain rose to prominence worldwide for his unique travel writing and fictionalised accounts of his experiences. His books The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1883) were well-liked.

His autobiographical literature, such as The Innocents Abroad (1869), was praised and distinguished by his unique writing style. It shouldn't be surprising that his manner is comparable to his travel and fiction writing. Mark Twain's work is characterised by command of the conversation and colloquial dialect, as well as an interest in a wide range of individuals who shape his fictional characters.

Mark Twain started penning lighthearted poems. Mark Twain adjusted his subject matter as his writing style evolved. His best-known works, like the novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, are humorous with compelling stories and social commentary.

Main aspects of writing

  • Dialogue in the local language:

Readers may be surprised at the wholly realised vernacular dialect used by Mark Twain's characters. The vernacular in Mark Twain's writing style aids in the growth of his fictitious characters. In this instance, the two central characters' divergent language highlights the distinctions in class between them more clearly.

  • Evocative imagery:

The rich details in Mark Twain's writing make them stand out. Examine the expressive language in this passage from his travelogue Innocents Abroad. The vivid language aids in placing the reader in the environment he is describing. It is exaggerated, romantic, and written at a pace that makes it enjoyable to read.

Reputation and Legacy

Howells wrote about Samuel Clemens in his book My Mark Twain, released shortly after Clemens passed away, describing him as the "unique, matchless, the Lincoln of our literature. According to Ernest Hemingway, all contemporary American writing can be traced back to Mark Twain's novel Huckleberry Finn, published twenty-five years later in The Green Hills of Africa. Both praises are a bit obtuse and excessive.

According to Howells' writing, the humorist spoke to and for the average American man and woman; he freed and elevated the speech and manners of a group of people whom authors and aristocratic America generally overlooked. For Howells, Twain's value was ostensibly social. Twain's accomplishment was aesthetic for Hemingway, and it was primarily contained in a single book. The hardest-hitting social satire Twain ever penned is found in "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," which is also one of his most structurally structured works.

The lengthier works frequently exhibit more creativity in their conception than persistent implementation. The Innocents Abroad, one of Twain's funniest works, redefined the travel narrative form by attempting to convey to the reader "how he would likely see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes," as Twain put it. Similarly, Tom Sawyer treated childhood as a time of mischievous fun and affection rather than as the attainment of obedience to adults.

These individuals-as well as many others-as well as Twain's scalawags, dreamers, stalwarts, and toughs, his solicitous aunts, ambitious politicians, whining widows, false aristocrats, cunning but kind enslaved people, sententious moralists, brave but misguided children, and decent but complicit bystanders, as well as his devoted lovers and friends and his fractious rivals, make up His command of spoken language, including slang, argot, and accent, gave these characters a voice. Twain's liberal leanings and resolute reluctance to show favouritism to even his most basic inventions offer his whole body of work a much more vast, intriguing, and thought-provoking perspective than his occasionally cynical philosophical ideas.


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