UNIT 6. MARK TWAIN

UNIT 6. MARK TWAIN

Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, (November 30, 1835, Florida, Missouri, U.S. – April 21, 1910, Redding, Connecticut), American humourist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who acquired international fame for his travel narratives, especially The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and Life on the Mississippi (1883), and for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). A gifted humourist and moralist, he became one of America’s best and most beloved writers.

Samuel Clemens was the sixth child of John Marshall and Jane Lampton Clemens. In many ways the childhood of Samuel Clemens was a rough one. Death from disease during this time was common. His sister Margaret died of a fever when Clemens was not yet four years old; three years later his brother Benjamin died. In 1847 Clemens’s father died of pneumonia. John Clemens’s death contributed further to the family’s financial instability.

Apart from family worries, the social environment was far from idyllic. Missouri was a slave state, and the young Clemens carried with him memories of cruelty and sadness that he would reflect upon in his maturity.

In 1848 Samuel Clemens became a printer’s apprentice for the Missouri Courier. Starting from the mid-19^th century, Samuel Clemens wrote and published numerous articles and sketches, which in the course of time appeared in New York papers. His story Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog was published in the New York Saturday Press in November 1865 and was subsequently reprinted throughout the country. “Mark Twain” had acquired sudden celebrity.

The next few years were important for Clemens. His first book was The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867). The highly episodic narrative of Tom Sawyer, which recounts the mischievous adventures of a boy growing up along the Mississippi River, was coloured by a nostalgia for childhood and simplicity that would permit Mark Twain to characterize the novel as a “hymn” to childhood. The continuing popularity of Tom Sawyer (it sold well from its first publication, in 1876, and has never gone out of print) indicates that Mark Twain could write a novel that appealed to young and old readers alike. The antics and high adventure of Tom Sawyer and his friends – including pranks in church and at school, the comic courtship of Becky Thatcher, a murder mystery, and a thrilling escape from a cave – continue to delight children, while the book’s comedy, narrated by someone who vividly recalls what it was to be a child, amuses adults with similar memories.

In the summer of 1876 Clemens began writing what he called in a letter to his friend William Dean Howells Huck Finn’s Autobiography. Huck had appeared as a character in Tom Sawyer, and Clemens decided that the untutored boy had his own story to tell. He soon discovered that it had to be told in Huck’s own vernacular voice. Huckleberry Finn was written in fits and starts over an extended period and would not be published until 1885. During that interval, Mark Twain often turned his attention to other projects, only to return again and again to the novel’s manuscript.

What distinguishes Huckleberry Finn from the others is the moral dilemma Huck faces in aiding the runaway slave Jim while at the same time escaping from the unwanted influences of so-called civilization. Through Huck, the novel’s narrator, Mark Twain was able to address the shameful legacy of chattel slavery prior to the Civil War and the persistent racial discrimination and violence after. That he did so in the voice and consciousness of a 14-year-old boy, a character who shows the signs of having been trained to accept the cruel and indifferent attitudes of a slaveholding culture, gives the novel its affecting power, which can elicit genuine sympathies in readers but can also generate controversy and debate and can affront those who find the book patronizing toward African Americans, if not perhaps much worse. If Huckleberry Finn is a great book of American literature, its greatness may lie in its continuing ability to touch a nerve in the American national consciousness that is still raw and troubling.

⇐ Предыдущая 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 232425 Следующая ⇒