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1、Mark Twain - Mirror of AmericaBy Noel Grove1. Most Americans remember Mark Twain as the father of Huck Finns idyllic cruise through eternal boyhood and Tom Sawyers endless summer of freedom and adventure. Indeed, this nations best-loved author was every bit as adventurous, patriotic, romantic, and h
2、umorous as anyone has ever imagined. I found another Twain - one who grew cynical, bitter, saddened by the profound personal tragedies life dealt him, a man who became obsessed with frailties of the human race, who saw clearly ahead a black wall of night.2. Tramp printer, river pilot, Confederate gu
3、errilla, prospector, starry-eyed optimist, acid-tongued cynic: the man who became Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens and he ranged across the nation for more than a third of his life, digesting the new American experience before sharing it with the world as writer and lecturer. He adopted
4、his pen name from the cry heard in his steamboat days, signaling two fathoms (12 feet) of water - a navigable depth. His popularity is attested by the fact that more than a score of his books remain in print, and translations are still read around the world.3. The geographic core, in Twains early ye
5、ars, was the great valley of the Mississippi River, main artery of transportation in the young nations heart. Keelboats, flatboats, and large rafts carried the first major commerce. Lumber, corn, tobacco, wheat, and furs moved downstream to the delta country; sugar, molasses, cotton, and whiskey tra
6、veled north. In the 1850s, before the climax of Westward Expansion, the vast basin drained three quarters of the settled United States.4. Young Mark Twain entered the world in 1857 as a cub pilot on a steamboat. The cast of characters set before him in his new profession was rich and varied - a cosm
7、os. He participated abundantly in his life, listening to pilothouse talk of feuds, piracies, lynchings, medicine show, and savage waterside slums. All would resurface in his books, together with the colorful language that he soaked up with a memory that seemed phonographic.5. Steamboat decks teemed
8、not only with the main current of pioneering humanity, but its flotsam of hustlers, gamblers, and thugs as well. From them all Mark Twain gained a keen perception of the human race, of the different between what people claim to be and what they really are. His four and a half years in the steamboat
9、trade marked the real beginning of his education, and the most lasting part of it. In later life Twain acknowledged that the river had acquainted him with every possible type of human nature. Those acquaintanceships strengthened all his writing, but he never wrote better than when he wrote of the pe
10、ople along the great stream.6. When railroads began drying up the demand for steamboat pilots and the Civil War halted commerce, Mark Twain left the river country. He tried soldiering for two weeks with a motley band of Confederate guerrillas who diligently avoided contact with the enemy. Twain quit
11、 after deciding, “ I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating.”7. He went west by stagecoach and succumbed to the epidemic of gold and silver fever in Nevadas Washoe region. For eight months he flirted with the colossal wealth available to the lucky and the persistent, and wa
12、s rebuffed. Broke and discouraged, he accepted a job as reporter with the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, to literatures enduring gratitude.8. From the discouragement of his mining failures, Mark Twain began digging his way to regional fame as a newspaper reporter and humorist. The instant ric
13、hes of a mining strike would not be his in the reporting trade, but for making money, his pen would prove mightier than his pickax. In the spring of 1864, less than two years after joining the Territorial Enterprise, he boarded the stagecoach for San Francisco, then and now a hotbed of hopeful young
14、 writers.9. Mark Twain honed and experimented with his new writing muscles, but he had to leave the city for a while because of some scathing columns he wrote. Attacks on the city government, concerning such issues as mistreatment of Chinese, so angered officials that he fled to the goldfields in th
15、e Sacramento Valley. His descriptions of the rough-country settlers there ring familiarly in modern world accustomed to trend setting on the West Coast. “It was a splendid population - for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home It was that population that gave to California a n
16、ame for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day - and when she projects a new surprise, the grave world smiles as usual, and says “Well, that is California all over.”10. In the dreary winter of 1864-65 in Angels Camp, he kept a notebook. Scattered among notations about the weather and the tedious mining-c
