Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) 1835-1910

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Samuel Langhorne Clemens(Mark Twain)1835-1910
A literary classic is a book which people praise
and dont read Mark Twain
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Sam Clemens as a boy

• Born on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri
• Sixth of seven children
• Only three siblings survived childhood

Do not put off until tomorrow what can be put
off till day-after-tomorrow just as well.
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Sam Clemens as a boy

• Brought up in Hannibal, MO, moved when four years
  old
• A sickly, strange, quiet child who hated the
  indoors and liked to run away.
• Purposely contracted the measles to gain
  attention and nearly died
• Father died when Sam was 11

By trying, we can easily learn to endure
adversity another mans, I mean.
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Sam as a young man

• Apprenticed to a printer and wrote for his
  brothers newspaper after his father died.

Worked as a type-setter and writer for the
Hannibal Journal When he turned 18, he became a
printer, living in several eastern cities,
including New York. Returned to Missouri at
22. Inspired to become a steamboat captain on a
trip to New Orleans When the Civil War ended
river traffic, he joined the Confederate army in
Missouri until it looked like they were going to
have to fight.
The man who doesnt read good books has no
advantage over the man who cant read them.
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Sam Clemens becomes Mark Twain

• Moved to Virginia City, Nevada, with his brother
  Orion and became a miner
• Failed at mining so he went to work at The
  Territorial Enterprise as a writer
• Used the pen-name Mark Twain for the first time
  in 1863

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let
people think you are a fool than to open it and
remove all doubt.
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Mark Twain in California

• Left for San Francisco to avoid a duel and became
  a reporter in 1864
• Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog was published
  around the country in 1865 giving Twain his
  first national fame
• Visited Hawaii as a correspondent for The
  Sacramento Union
• Set out on a tour of the Mediterranean and Europe
  in 1867 wrote about it successfully as The
  Innocents Abroad in 1869

Clothes make the man. Naked people have
little or no influence on society.
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Marriage and Home Life

• Writing success gave Twain enough money to marry
  Olivia Langdon in 1870

Moved to Buffalo, NY First child, son Langdon,
died at 19 months Eventually had three daughters
Susy, Clara, and Jean
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Movin on up

• The Twains moved to Hartford, Connecticut

Education that which reveals to the wise, and
conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of
their knowledge.
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From travel writer to immortal artist

• Started Huck Finn in 1876 but quit by chapter 16
  because of difficulties with the plot
• Published
• Tom Sawyer 1876
• The Prince and the Pauper 1881
• Life on the Mississippi 1883
• Huckleberry Finn 1884

Dont go around saying the world owes you a
living. The world owes you nothing. It was here
first.
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Later life

• Susy died in 1896 while Twain was on a world tour
• Olivia died in 1904
• Later works were darker with a tinge of
  bitterness
• Died on April 21, 1910

I have never let my schooling interfere with my
education.
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The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

• All modern literature comes from one book by
  Mark Twain called Huckleberry FinnAll American
  writing comes from that. There was nothing
  before. There has been nothing as good since.
• -Ernest Hemingway

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Huckleberry Finn

• Huckleberry Finn is thought to be a sequel to The
  Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but the first sixteen
  chapters of Huck were written before Tom Sawyer
  was published.
• The novel is really about a boys discovery of
  true morality by shedding the messed up
  conventions of society in favor of his own sense
  of right and wrong.
• Huck Finn is a comedy in which the humor is
  disguised mostly ironic humor as real
  situations and people are different than Huck
  perceives them to be.

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Plot

• The plot is episodic, meaning that it has a
  series of separate situations, or episodes, that
  are almost unrelated but tied together by a
  certain character, theme, or device.
• The Mississippi River is the plot device that
  holds the different episodes together.
• The plot alternates between the idyllic life on
  the raft and the confusion, gullibility,
  callousness, and prejudice of the people within
  the towns along the banks of the river.

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Characterization

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the first
  American novel to use dialect (the way people
  really speak in a certain region) in such
  abundance
• Huck is in the picaresque (rogue) novel tradition
  in which the main character is a rascal, thief or
  scoundrel
• Huck is an unreliable narrator, meaning he cannot
  be trusted to see the action of the story
  accurately he has the perspective of a naïve,
  young boy
• Hucks straightforward reporting of ridiculous
  situations provides much of the humor in the book
  as the reader sees what is going on while Huck
  may not.
• Huck is a tableau rasa (a blank slate) untainted
  by societys traditions, relying on instinct and
  common sense

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Themes

• The hypocrisy of a certain type of religion
  Twain did not like Southern-based Christianity
  that taught love and compassion but sanctioned
  slavery
• The ineffectualness of the law to protect the
  most innocent and weak members of society
• Traditions that stifle creativity and common
  sense but promote conformity and
  narrow-mindedness are to be abandoned

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Themes

• Society is the individual violence, greed,
  conformity, laziness, gullibility, and
  selfishness of common citizens ruled by imperfect
  laws
• Satire (making fun of a serious subject through
  exaggeration or mockery in order to improve the
  subject of mockery) of other melodramatic novels
  of the time period (melodramas being those plots
  that rely on suspense, sensational events, and
  coincidence)

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Conflicts

• Huck matures and develops into a moral human
  being as he journeys down the Mississippi, Hucks
  moral struggles are the central conflict of the
  novel as he frees himself from the taint of the
  society in which he grew up
• Good vs. bad type of religion
• Widow Douglass vs. Miss Watsons
• Life on the raft vs. life in society on shore
• Jim and Huck are free on the river and bound on
  land
• Instinct vs. education
• Hucks common sense vs. Toms book learning