Twain, Mark. (1835 - 1910).

L i f e

- born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Hannibal, a frontier town by Mississippi = the cross-section of all the directions and of the Western wilderness x Eastern civilisation, Southern slavery x Northern abolitionism

- largely self-educated, apprenticed in a printing shop, worked from 12 to support family after his father’s death

- intended to go to Amazon to find adventure and wealth x but: instead apprenticed to a pilot of a Mississippi riverboat > adopted the penname of Mark Twain = ‘safe water’

W o r k

- a humorist, realist, social realist, and the representative man of American popular culture: more successful than any of the authors before him

- remained a rough Westerner with no university education (unlike earlier authors): established a new pattern of writing including the frontier humour and the storytelling conventions of his journalistic experiences

- his narrative technique: a written equivalent of ‘deadpan’ lecturing, convincing the audience he simply reports what others said and did

< journalism: his critical sense of violence, corruption, and the decay of the American dream

< local colour: sentimentalism, nostalgia for the Age of Innocence (= the pre-Gold Rush x the Gilded Age), and criticism of the damaging influences of commercialism and industrialism

< folklore: the oral tradition, local customs, Tall-Tale

“The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865):

- a hoax, the first  piece to bring him popularity

The Innocents Abroad (1869):

- a travel book, originally a series of letters for the newspaper from his excursion to Europe

- a satire against the pretentious, decadent, and undemocratic Old World

The Gilded Age (1873):

- in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner

Roughing It (1877):

- the pattern of Innocents applied to the Wild West

- an account of his and his brother’s adventures in the Nevada territory and the schemes he devised to get rich quick

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876):

- a myth of the endless summer of childhood pleasures mixed with terror

Old Times on the Mississippi (1875) >> Life on the Mississippi (1883):

- returns chronologically backward and psychically inward to the Hannibal of his boyhood

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884):

- a more serious sequal to Tom and his realistic, satiric, yet lyrical masterpiece

- an attempt of a more complex explanation, deconstructs some myths x but: reconstructs others

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889):

- his anarchism end up in a rejection of old and new values alike

The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894):

- disastrous effects of slavery on the victimiser and victim alike

- his satire turns to scorn and contempt for the ‘damned human race’

What Is Man? (1899):

- his ‘Bible’ expressing his indignation at orthodox Christianity, racism, imperialism, etc.