Mark twain (1835-1910)

Рseudonym of SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS, American humorist, writer, and lecturer who won a worldwide audience for his stories of youthful adventures, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

It was in Virginia City on Feb. 3, 1863, that "Mark Twain" was born when Clemens, then 27, signed a humorous travel account with that pseudonym. The new name was a riverman's term for water "two fathoms deep" and thus just barely safe for navigation. Published in a New York periodical, The Saturday Press, in November 1865, the story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County was an immediate hit when it was reprinted in newspapers far and wide. Written much in the manner of the Southwestern humour of the period of Clemens' youth, this fine tall tale brought not only his first national fame but also the first approval of his work by several discerning critics.

When, in 1866, the Pacific Steamboat Company inaugurated passenger service between San Francisco and Honolulu, Twain took the trip as a correspondent for The Sacramento Union. His letters and the lectures that he later gave about the trip were immediately popular. Since he enjoyed going places and talking about them, he set out again as "traveling correspondent" for California's largest paper, the Alta California; it was advertised that he would "circle the globe and write letters" as he went. The letters that he wrote during the next five months, for the Alta California and Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, caught the public fancy and, when revised for publication in 1869 as The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrim's Progress, established Twain as a popular favourite. In his book Twain sharply satirized tourists who learned what they should see and feel by carefully reading guidebooks. He assumed the role of a keen-eyed, shrewd Westerner who was refreshingly honest and vivid in describing foreign scenes and his reactions to them. It is probable that Americans liked the implication that a common man could judge the Old World as well as the next man. But the chief attraction of the book was its humour, which readers of the time found delightful. The book showed that Mark Twain had found a method of writing about travel which, though seemingly artless, deftly employed changes of pace. Serious passages – history, statistics, description, explanation, argumentation – alternated with laughable ones. The humour itself was varied, sometimes being in the vein of the Southwestern yarn spinners whom he had encountered when a printer's devil, sometimes in that of contemporaneous humorists such as Artemus Ward and Josh Billings, who chiefly used burlesque and parody, anticlimactic sentences, puns, malapropisms, and other verbal devices. Thereafter he was to use the formula successfully in a number of books combining factual materials with humour.

In 1870 Twain resumed his career as a public lecturer who charmed audiences with laconic recitations of incredible comic incidents.

Twain continued to lecture with great success in the United States and, in 1872 and 1873, in England, holding audiences spellbound with his comic-coated satire, drawling cadences, and outlandish exaggerations. He recorded his experiences as a pilot in Old Times on the Mississippi for the Atlantic Monthly (1875), expanded eight years later to Life on the Mississippi, an authentic and compelling de­scription of a way of life that was, even then, long past. After ha­ving written boyhood friends, asking them to send their recollections of old days in Hannibal, he published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, a narrative of youthful escapades that became an immediate and continuing favourite.

Tom Sawyeris perhaps Twain's best book for a juvenile audience. The setting was a small Mississippi River town, and the characters were the grownups and the children of the town in the 1830s. The book's nostalgic attitude and its wistful re-creation of pre-Civil War life is humorously spiced by its main character, Tom Sawyer. Rather than being the prematurely moral "model boy" of Sunday-school stories, Tom is depicted as "the normal boy," mischievous and irresponsible but goodhearted; and the book's subplots show him winning triumphs again and again. These happy endings endear the book to children, while the lifelike picture of a boy and his friends is enjoyed by both young and old.

Twain turned next to historical fiction. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) he transplants a commonsensical Yankee back in time to Britain during the Dark Ages. Through a series of wary adventures Twain celebrates American homespun ingenuity in contrast to the superstitious ineptitude of a chivalric monarchy.

The popular image of Mark Twain was by now well-established. He was a gruff but knowledgeable, unaffected man who had been places and seen things and was not fooled by pretense. He talked and wrote with contagious humanity and charm in the language of ordinary people. At the same time, he scornfully berated man; evolution failed, he said, when man appeared, for his was the only evil heart in the entire animal kingdom. Yet Mark Twain was one with those he scorned: what any man sees in the human race, he admitted, "is merely himself in the deep and private honesty of his own heart." Perceptive, comic, but also bitter, Twain seemed to be the mirror of all men.