Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Mark Twain to 1876 (America's Centennial)
Hannibal, Missouri (1869)
Samuel Clemens b. 1835 in Hannibal, Missouri: - Unhappy
Childhood
- Mississippi Riverboat Pilot
- 1st Job: Printer Brother (Franklin Printing Co.)
- Gold Rush Freelance Journalist
- Humorist and Lecturer: "The Celebrated Jumping Frog
of Calaveras County" (1867)
- Innocents Abroad (1869)
- Roughing It (1872)
"The
Story of the Old Ram"
- After achieving success in the NYC publishing world,
Clemens married Olivia Langdon, from a High
Victorian Eastern Society family, and settled in Connecticut.
- It was an interesting match: "Gilded Age America" meets
"Southwestern Frontier Humor", like wild, rollicking, rowdy,
fresh humor (w/ attendant racism & violence) crashing
New England Party of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Alcott
and Co.
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"The Story of the Old Ram" from
Roughing It (1872) |
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(1876)
- Twain's Don Quixote: the eternal child
- America's Nostalgia for Lost Innocence: 1840's (compare
to Winslow Homer)
Winslow
Homer, "Snap the Whip" (1872)
- Whitewashing the Fence (vs. Franklin's work ethic)
- Tom Attending His Own Funeral
- Injun Jim's Revenge ("notchin' ears and slittin'
noses")
- Tom and Becky in MacDougal's Cave
- Tom's Destiny: The Town's #1 Citizen
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"Whitewashing the Fence" from
Tom Sawyer (1876) |
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1876-1885)
- Huck's Adventures vs. Tom's Adventures:
- A Rite of Passage into an Adult World (full of abuse, slave
hunters, con men, and murderers)
- Twain's Warning:
Notice:
No Answers Here
Twain's Style
1st Person Narrator (How does the
reader discover the truth?)
Just letting his characters
talk: Watch for Silences and Omissions |
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