Mark Twain

MARK TWAIN (1835-1910)

Mark Twain was born in the village of Florida, Missouri. His father, a shopkeeper, had moved there the year before, but his business failed and he moved to Hannibal, a flourishing town on the west bank of the Mississipi. It was here that Twain spent his boyhood, by the river which,in those years, was the great high-road of American life: it carried the commerce ofAmerica on its keeboats, steamboats and rafts. In his day,the river traffic was dominated by the luxurious paddle-steam-ers, “floating palaces” which epitomized the booming economy of the South before the Civil War. The fascination and excitement of the river became one of the central themes in Twain’s writing.
The young Twain did various jobs before working on a local newspaper founded by his eldestbrother. At 18, however, he left Hannibal and began to lead a wandering life. He lived briefly in New York City , Philadelphia, Washington D.C, Muscatine (in Iowa), and finally spent a couple of years with his brother in Keokuk ,lowa. In 1856 he was travelling down the Mississipi as correspondent for a Keokuk newspaper, but on the riverboat he changed his mind and fulfilled his boyhood ambition bypersuading a river pilot to accept his as apprentice.
The Mississipi was a dangerous river with a constantly shifting bed; river pilots were extremely skilled and highly paid men, the “aristocrats” of river life.
He obtained his pilot’s licence after eighteen months of training and spent a total of four years on the river. The experience was invaluable to him as a writer, because- as he latersaid- “ in that brief,sharp schooling, I got personally acquainted with about all the diffent types of human nature”.
His career was interrupted by the Civil War. Twain’s journalist brother had helped Lincoln in his presidential campaign and he was rewarded with a government appointment in Nevada. In those days Neveda was part of the Western frontier. Twain invested money unsuccessfully in timberand mining and then took a job writing for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. He travelled around the territory and wrote articles about the life of miners and lumberjacks. It was at this time that he devised his pseudonym, Mark Twain, a term taken from his days as a riverboat pilot: on board, the depth of the river was continually measured with a weighted line and the man handling it wouldcall out to the pilot the depth in fathoms: “ Mark four,mark three,mark twain”: at less than “mark twain” the ship would be in danger of running aground.
In 1864 he went to San Francisco. His tales and sketches were now making him famous and he was appointed “travelling correspondent” for a California newspaper, the “ San Francisco Alta California”. His job required him to travel widely and sendback travel reports. In 1867 he embarked with a number of friends on a voyage to the Holy Land via the Mediterranean. The reports he sent back on the voyage, humorous and serious, were an immense success, especially after their publication in book form as “ The innocents abroad”. He increased his reputation by giving public lectures about the trip and recounting episodes from his life on theMississipi and in western states. In 1872 he did a lecture tour of Britain, also a great success.
In 1870 Twain had married and settle down in Hartford,Connecticut, where the family lived happily for twenty years, during which Twain produced his most important books.
For a financial ruin he was developing a more pessimistic outlook, and these events only substantiated his ideas. He had alwaysinsisted on the follies and crimes of mankind, even in his most humorous works; and his sense of human evil is marked in much of his later work.
He died in 1910.

Realism and Symbolism

Like other writers from the Realistic Period, Mark Twain represented life in a realistic manner. His style was humorous and descriptive, capturing the colloquial voice of American speech with slang and iconoclasm....