《Mark Twain(英文简介)》由会员分享,可在线阅读,更多相关《Mark Twain(英文简介)(5页珍藏版)》请在金锄头文库上搜索。
1、Mark Twain Mark Twain (1835 19l0) 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 worlds view of America and made a more extensiv
2、e combination of American folk humor and serious literature than previous writers had ever done.1. Brief Introduction to the AuthorMark Twain, Pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was born on November 30, 1835, in Missouri, and grew up in the river town of Hannibal. After his father died, he began
3、to seek his own fortune .He once worked as a journeyman printer, a steamboat pilot, a newspaper colunist and as a deadpan lecturer. Twains writing took the form of humorous journalism of the time, and it ennabled him to master the technique of narration. Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which pr
4、ovided the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. After an apprenticeship with a printer, he worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to his older brother Orions newspaper. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referre
5、d humorously to his singular lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. In 1865, his humorous story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was published, based on a story he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp California where he had s
6、pent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention, even being translated to classic Greek. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.Though Twain earned a
7、 great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks he filed for protection from his creditors via a bankruptcy fili
8、ng, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no responsibility to do this under the law.Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halleys Comet, and he predicted that he would “go
9、 out with it,” too. He died the day following the comets subsequent return. He was lauded as the “greatest American humorist of his age,” and William Faulkner called Twain “the father of American literature.”2. Mark Twains major worksIn l865, he pub1ished his frontier tale “The Celebrated Jumping Fr
10、og of Calaveras County,” which brought him recognition from a wider public. But his full literary career began to blossom in 1869 with a travel book Innocents Abroad, an account of American tourists in Europe which pokes fun at the pretentious, decadent and undemocratic Old World in a satirical tone
11、. Mark Twains best works were produced when he was in the prime of his life. All these masterworks drew upon the scenes and emotions of his boyhood and youth. The first among these books is Roughing It (1872), in which Twain describes a journey that works its way farther west. Life on the Mississipp
12、i tells a story of his boyhood ambition to become a riverboat pilot. Two of the best books during this period are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The former is usually regarded as a classic book written for boys about their particular horrors and joys, while t
13、he latter, being a boys book specially written for the adults, is Twains most representative work, describing a journey down the Mississippi undertaken by two fugitives, Huck and Jim. Their episodic set of encounters presents a sample of the social world from the bank of the river that runs through
14、the heart of the country. His social satire is The Gilded Age, written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner. 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. Twains
15、 dark view of the society became more self-evident in the works published later in his life. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court (1889), a parable of colonialization. A similar mood of despair permeates The Tragedy of Puddnhead Wilson (1894), which shows the disastrous effects of slavery o
16、n 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”