Mark Twain

The Main Features of Mark Twain's Writing Style

Ⅰ.Introduction

Mark Twain (pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910), was one of the best known American writers, journalist and humorist, who won a worldwide audience for his stories of the youthful adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in the 19th century.

Mark Twain was born on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri in the middle part of the United States. He was brought up in Hannibal, Missouri. His father, a poor lawyer, died when he was only twelve years old. So he had to leave school and make his own living. He was apprenticed to a printer and wrote for his brother's newspaper. He later worked as a licensed Mississippi river-boat pilot. In 1861, Mark Twain became a miner in Nevada. During this period, he started to write short articles. It was as this time that he adopted the pen name \the sailors measuring the depth of the water when the water was two marks deep on the lead. The Civil War put an end to the steamboat traffic and Clemens moved to Virginia City, where he edited the Territorial Enterprise. On February 3, 1863, 'Mark Twain' was born when Clemens signed a humorous travel account with that pseudonym

In 1864 Twain left for California, and worked in San Francisco as a reporter. He visited Hawaii as a correspondent for The Sacramento Union, publishing letters on his trip and giving lectures. He set out on a world tour, traveling in France and Italy. His experiences were recorded in 1869 in The Innocents Abroad, which gained him wide popularity, and poked fun at both American and European prejudices and manners. The success as a writer gave Twain enough financial security to marry Olivia Langdon in 1870. They moved next year to Hartford. Twain continued to lecture in the United States and England. Between 1876 and 1884 he published several masterpieces, Tom Sawyer (1881) and The Prince and the Pauper (1881). Life On The Mississippi appeared in 1883 and Huckleberry Finn in 1884.

In the 1890s Twain lost most of his earnings in financial speculations and in the failure of his own publishing firm. To recover from the bankruptcy, he started a world lecture tour, during which one of his daughters died. Twain toured New Zealand, Australia, India, and South Africa. He wrote such books as The Tragedy Of Pudd'head

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Wilson (1884), Personal Recollections Of Joan Of Arc (1885), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and the travel book Following The Equator (1897). During his long writing career, Twain also produced a considerable number of essays. The death of his wife and his second daughter darkened the author's later years, which is seen in his posthumously published autobiography (1924). Twain died on April 21, 1910.

At the heart of Mark Twain's achievement is his creation of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, who embody the mythic America, midway between the wilderness and the model state. Some of his writings have been translated into many languages. He and his works are deeply loved by readers throughout the world. Mark Twain once said, “To believe yourself to be brave is to be brave; it is the only essential thing. ”（Autobiography of Mark Twain）

Ⅱ. The Features of Mark Twain's Writing Style

Twain’s works, containing some practical jokes, comic details, witty remarks,

etc., and some of them are actually tall tales. At the same time, his writing style contain many features. The details are as follows:

A. The important founder of realistic American literature

The period ranging from 1865 to 1914 has been referred to as the Age of Realism in the literary history. It can be described as by a works of Mark Twain ‘The Golden Age’. The harsh realities of life as well as the disillusion of heroism resulting form the dark memories of the Civil War have set the nation against the romance. This new attitude was characterized by a great interest in the realities of life. It aimed at the interpretation of the actualities of any aspect of life. The content of this age is actualities and the form is truthful treatment of life.

Mark Twain is a great literary giant of America, whom H.L.Mencken considered “the true father of our national literature.” With works like Adventure of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and Life on the Mississippi (1883), Twain shaped the world’s view of America and made a more extensive combination of American folk humor and serious literature than previous writers had ever done.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and, especially, its sequence Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn proved themselves to be the mile stone in American literature..The

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childhood of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in the Mississippi is a record of a vanished way of life in the pre-Civil War Mississippi valley and it has moved millions of people of different ages and conditions all over the world; and the books are noted for their unpretentious, colloquial yet poetic style, their wide-ranging humor, and their universally shared dream of perfect innocence and freedom.

His novel Adventure of Huckleberry Finn is a vindication of what Mark Twain called “the damned human race.” That is the theme of man’s inhumanity to man---of human cruelty, hypocrisies, dishonesties, and moral corruptions.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is best known for Mark Twain’s wonderful characterization of “Huck,” a typical American boy whom its creator described as a boy with “a sound heart and a deformed conscience,” and remarkable for the raft’s journey down the Mississippi river, which Twain used both realistically and symbolically to shape his book into an organic whole.

Through the eyes of Huck, the innocent and reluctant rebel, we see the pre-Civil War American society fully exposed and at the same time we are deeply impressed by Mark Twain’s thematic contrasts between innocence and experience, nature and culture, wilderness and civilization.

His The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was a story about a popular theme in American literature. The two young heroes, Tom and Huck Finn, are \only because they fight against the stupidity of the adult world. In the end they win. Twain creates a highly realistic background for the story. We get to know the village very well with its many colorful characters, its graveyards and the house in which a ghost is supposed to exist. Although there are many similarities between Tom and Huck, there are also important differences. Twain studies the psychology of his characters carefully. Tom is very romantic. His view of life comes from books about knights in the Middle Ages. A whistle from Huck outside Tom's window calls him out for a night of adventures. Afterwards, Tom can always return to his Aunt Polly's house. Huck has no real home. By the end of the novel, we can see Tom growing up. Soon, he will also be a part of the adult world. Huck, however, is a real outsider.

B. Local color

Mark Twain uses the Mississippi valley as his fictional kingdom, writing about the landscape and people, the customs and the dialects of one particular region, and therefore known as a local colorist.

Twain is known as a local colorist, who preferred to present social life through portraits of the local characters of his regions, including people living in that area, the landscape, and other peculiarities like the customs, dialects, costumes and so on. Consequently, the rich material of his boyhood experience on the Mississippi became

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the endless resources for his fiction, and the Mississippi valley and the West became his major theme.Mark Twain wrote about the lower-class people, because they were the people he knew so well and their 1ife was the one he himself had lived. Moreover he successfully used local color and historical settings to i1lustrate and she delight on the contemporary society.

Twain depicted social life through descriptions of local places and people he knew best and believed that \the most valuable capital, or culture, or education usable in the building of novels is personal experience.\（Autobiography of Mark Twain）

Local color in American literature refers to a unique variation of American literary realism, such as the particular concern about the local character of a region. Mark Twain and some other American realistic writers’ works are characterized with local colors. Generally, the works by local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well--defined region or province. This kind of fiction depicts the characters from a specific setting or of an era, which are marked by its customs, dialects, costumes, landscape, or other peculiarities that have escaped standardizing cultural influence. These writers were nostalgic and sentimental, but they dedicated themselves to accurate descriptions of the life of their regions. They worked from personal experience; they recorded the facts of a unique environment and suggested that the native life was shaped by the curious conditions of the loca1e.Their materials were necessarily limited and topics disparate, yet they had certain common artistic concerns.

C. Satire

As a satirist, he employed his common, lowly characters as vernacular spokesmen to deflate the values of the official culture of his day and what he saw as the rattle-brained folly of American politics of imperialism. His social satire is The Gilded Age. The novel explored the scrupulous individualism in a world of fantastic speculation and unstable values, and gave its name to the get-rich-quick years of the post-Civil War era. Twain’s dark view of the society became more self-evident in the works published later in his life. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), a parable of colonialization. A similar mood of despair permeates The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), which shows the disastrous effects of slavery on the victimizer and the victim alike and reveals to us a Mark Twain whose conscience as a white Southerner was tormented by fear and remorse. By the turn of the century, with the publication of The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg (l900) and The Mysterious Stranger (1916), the change in Mark Twain from an optimist to an almost despairing pessimist could be felt and his cynicism and disillusionment with what Twain referred to regularly as the “damned human race” became obvious.

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Mark Twain's humor is remarkable. It is fun to read Twain to begin with, for most of his works tend to be funny, containing some practical jokes, comic details, witty remarks, etc., and some of them are actually tall tales. By considering his experience as a newspaperman, Mark Twain shared the popular image of the American funny man whose punning, facetious, irreverent articles filled the newspapers, and a great deal of his humor is characterized by puns, straight-faced exaggeration, repetition, and anti-climax, let alone tricks of travesty and invective. However, his humor is not only of witty remarks mocking at small things or of farcical elements making people laugh, but a kind of artistic style used to criticize the social injustice and satirize the decayed romanticism.

Sometimes Twain wrote a sentimental story, not because he was sentimental, but because he wanted to show the reader how stupid such a story really was. So the reader has to be very careful when he or she reads Mark Twain. Twain often played trick on the reader. He often said things when he meant just the opposite. This is the irony that he got from the humor of the Far West. He would often do things that he did just to make fun of, but the reader might think that he really meant it. Then the reader was the tender-foot who got taken in.

Huckleberry Finn, by general agreement, is Twain's finest book and an outstanding American novel. Its narrator is Huck, a youngster whose carelessly recorded vernacular speech is admirably adapted to detailed and poetic description of scenes, vivid representations of characters, and narrative renditions that are both broadly comic and subtly ironic.

\There it is: it doesn't make any difference who we are or what we are, there's always somebody to look down on! Somebody to hold in light esteem, somebody to be indifferent about.\–1910), U.S. author. \Thousand Years Among the Microbes,\the Dream? ed. by John S. Tuckey, 1967). This quote says that people will always feel superior to some one different. The reason for this is that it makes people feel important and better about themselves. Slavery derived from this belief in superiority. Mark Twain, author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn uses satire as a literary technique to present his ideals on slavery within his period of time. Satire is a method of taking a serious issue and representing it in a humorous way. The Author uses Huck's relationship with Jim, society’s attitude towards Jim during their travel up the Mississippi River, and the use of racist terminology throughout the novel. Mark Twain's use of satire in the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn enables the reader to better understand his message of slavery. The harsh realities of life as well as the disillusion of heroism resulting form the dark memories of the Civil War have set the nation against the romance. This new attitude was characterized by a great interest in the realities of life. It aimed at the interpretation of the actualities of any aspect of life. The content of this age is actualities and the form is truthful treatment of life.

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