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The Local Color Mark TwainLocal Color:w A kind of fiction that came to prominence in the USA in the late 19th century, and was devoted to capturing the unique customs, manners, speech, folklore, and other qualities of a particular regional community, usually in humorous short stories. The most famous of the local colorists was Mark Twain; others included Bret Hart, Kate Chopin, and Sarah Orne Jewett.(Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms) w Regionalism, or local-color fiction, was a perspective of literature that gained popularity in the United States after the Civil War. w Local-color writers depicted nearly every region of the United States, lending realism to their stories by describing customs, manners and re-creating dialects. w Because these authors usually set their stories in regions as they remembered them from their own youth, they often blended realism with nostalgic sentiment. Many Americans found this mixture palatable, and local-color stories filled the pages of the leading magazines until the end of the nineteenth century. Samuel Langhorne Clemens:w “Mark Twain” was the pseudonym of American writer Samuel Langhorne Clemens.w He was born in Florida, Missouri, to a Tennessee country merchant, John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton Clemens. w He was the sixth of seven children. Only three of his siblings survived childhood: his brothers Orion and Henry, and his sister Pamela. w When Twain was four, his family moved to Hannibal, a port town on the Mississippi River that would serve as the inspiration for the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. w At that time, Missouri was a slave state in the Union, and young Twain became familiar with the institution of slavery, a theme he later explored in his writing.Early Life:w When Twain was 11, his father died of pneumonia. The following year, he left school and became a printers apprentice. w In 1851, he began working as a typesetter and contributor of articles and humorous sketches for the Hannibal Journal, a newspaper owned by his brother, Orion.w When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, etc. w He joined the union and educated himself in public libraries in the evenings, finding wider sources of information than he would have at a conventional school.w At 22, Twain returned to Missouri. On a voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi, the steamboat pilot, Horace E. Bixby, inspired Twain to pursue a career as a steamboat pilot;w it was a richly rewarding occupation with wages set at $250 per month, equivalent to $155,000 a year today. Pen Name:w It is from this work that he got the idea of his pen name “Mark Twain”, which is the phrase Mississippi boatmen used to signify two fathoms (3.6 meters) of water, the depth needed for a boats safe passage. w later he began to write humorous accounts and stories such as “The Notorious Jumping Frog of the Calaveras County” based on his personal experiences as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi.Marriage:w Twain met , who showed him a picture of his sister Olivia; Twain claimed to have fallen in love at first sight. They met in 1868, were engaged a year later, and married in February 1870 in Elmira, New York. w She came from a wealthy but liberal family, and through her he met abolitionists, socialists, principled atheists and activists for womens rights and social equality, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass and the utopian socialist William Dean Howells.w The couples marriage lasted 34 years, until Olivias death in 1904. Olivia gave birth to three daughters: Susy (1872-1896), Clara(1874-1962) , and Jean (1880-1909). Death:w In his last years, many misfortunes happed on Twain, and he grew seriously bitter and pessimistic.w Twain outlived Jean and Susy. He passed through a period of deep depression, which began in 1896 when his favorite daughter Susy died of meningitis. w Olivias death in 1904 and Jeans death on December 24, 1909, deepened his gloom. Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut. Major Works:6w Innocents Abroad(1869)w The Gilded Age (1873) w The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)w The Prince and the Pauper(1882)w Life on the Mississippi (1883)w Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)w A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court(1889)w The Man That Corrupted Hadleydburg (1900)The Gilded Age:w The Gilded Age written in collaboration with an older writer, Charles Dudley Warner. It sold well and the name, which Twain created, is still often used to describe the corrupt post Civil War period in which and about which, the book was written. Yet neither Twain nor his co-authors understanding of the age was really adequate, and the collaboration resulted in a rather fragmentary uneven work.w The sharply satirized the fraudulent land speculation, dishonest or self-deceiving hopes in get-rich-quick schemes, and above all the public corruption of its era. Congressmen as well as state legislators openly took bribes to vote for bills authorizing the virtual theft of huge tracts of public land and public funds. w The Gilded Age also satirized many of the pseudo-romantic popular novels of the time and attacked hypocritical professions of religion, patriotism, or philanthropy. But it moves uneasily from satire to farce, includes chapters of sheer melodrama in the style of the very novels it was mocking, and weakens even its many telling pictures of political corruption by the unrealized basic contradiction in Twains own thinking. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer:w A novel by Mark Twain published in 1876. Tom is an intelligent and imaginative boy, who is nevertheless careless and mischievous. w In one of the books most famous episodes he is forced to whitewash the front-yard fence as punishment for playing truant. w He evades the task by pretending it is a great privilege, and then allowing other boys to take over from him for a considerable price.w Tom lives in the respectable home of his Aunt Polly in the Mississippi River town of St Petersburg, Missouri. His preferred world, however, is the outdoor and parentless life of his friend Huck Finn. When Tom is rebuffed by his sweetheart, Becky Thatcher, he and Huck take to the diversion of playing pirates. By coincidence, they are in the graveyard on the night that Indian Joe murders the town doctor and frame the drunkard, Muff Potter, by placing the knife in his hands. w Tom, Huck, and a third boy hide out on a river island in fear of the half-breed murderer, and are believed dead. w They finally return to witness their own passionate eulogies, and with much uproar they are discovered in the funeral audience. w Later Tom becomes a hero, when at the trial of Muff Potter he stands up and accuses the true murderer. Joe rushes from the room and thus proves his own guilt. Subsequently Tom and Becky abandon a school picnic and get themselves lost for several days in the very cave where Joe is hiding. w They make good their escape, and Tom then returns to cave with Huck. They find Injun Joe dead, and also find his buried treasure. The two boys return to town as heroic as ever, and the riches are divided between them.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Twains masterpiece, which appeared in 1884, is set in the Mississippi River village of St. Petersburg. The son of an alcoholic bum, Huck has just been adopted by a respectable family when his father, in a drunken stupor, threatens to kill him. Fearing for his life, Huck escapes, feigning his own death. He is joined in his escape by another outcast, the slave Jim, whose owner, Miss Watson, is thinking of selling him down the river to the harsher slavery of the Deep South. Huck and Jim float on a raft down the majestic Mississippi, but are sunk by a steamboat, separated, and later reunited. They go through many comical and dangerous shore adventures that show the variety, generosity, and sometimes cruel irrationality of society. In the end, it is discovered that Miss Watson had already freed Jim, and a respectable family is taking care of the wild boy Huck. But Huck grows impatient with civilized society and plans to escape to “the territories” - Indian lands. The ending gives the reader the counter-version of the classic American success myth: the open road leading to the pristine wilderness, away from the morally corrupting influences of “civilization”. Huckleberry Finn has inspired countless literary interpretations. Clearly, the novel is a story of death, rebirth, and initiation. The escaped slave, Jim, becomes a father figure for Huck; in deciding to save Jim, Huck grows morally beyond the bounds of his slave-owning society. It is Jims adventures that initiate Huck into the complexities of human nature and give him moral courage.Life on the Mississippi:w Originally published in 1883, Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twains memoir of his youthful years as a cub pilot on a steamboat paddling up and down the Mississippi River. Twain used his childhood experiences growing up along the Mississippi in a number of works, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but nowhere is the river and the pilots life more thoroughly described than in this work. Told with insight, humor, and candor, Life on the Mississippi is an American classic.w The unstable relationship between reality and illusion is Twains characteristic theme, the basis of much of his humor. The magnificent yet deceptive, constantly changing river is also the main feature of his imaginative landscape.w In Life on the Mississippi, Twain recalls his training as a young steamboat pilot when he writes: “I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the eluding and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or hands on, that was the chief.” The Celebrated Jumping Frog of the Calaveras County:w This collection of stories was Mark Twains first published book. The title sketch, which first appeared in the New York Saturday Press in 1865, was based on an old California folk tale.w Danl Websteer, the champion-jumping frog, is owned by Jim Smiley. A stranger claims that any frog could beat him, and sends Smiley off to catch another one to have a contest.w Danl is defeated, but only because, as Smiley discovers after the race, the stranger has filled the stomach of the other mans frog with tiny metal balls. Analysis:w It is one of the most famous tall tales written by Mark Twain, who has mostly become popular of his Huckleberry Finn stories, but the Jumping Frog was one of his first story and the one that brought Twain into notice to the public. w When he was writing for newspapers he was also traveling a lot, for example to California. On the ship he made acquaintance of Bret Hawk and when they reached San Francisco Mint, Twain told Hawk this story of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” as it was called at first.w Nowadays Twain, is described as humorist and master of simple and effective narrative and of vivid description, but under all this lie depths of melancholic wisdom and a great capacity for righteous indignation. The “Jumping Frog” certainly implies all of this.w The setting of the story is Angels Camp, a mining town in the west, still existing today. The date is winter 1849/ spring 1850 during the gold-rush. w At first sight the story seems to be childish, without any deeper meaning and very confusing. Latter is due to the fact that it is a story within a story- a background story. One might get the impression that the narrative proliferates and the reader finds it difficult to keep track. w As mentioned above, we deal with a tall tale (boast), a genre with features like the vernacular speech, very obvious in the Jumping frog and the disorientation of the reader who does not know whether he is being confronted with a lie or the truth. In fact the tall tale is something in between. w The story starts with a short introduction and continues with a line of narratives. In the introduction the background story teller, who is from the East appears and claims that he is looking for a person called Reverend Leonidas W. Smiley. w He has been told that he might ask Simon Wheeler, a man from the West because Smiley had once been his companion of boyhood and a resident of Angels Camp. w In this paragraph the reader is confronted with a high registered speech, a symbol for the educated and civilized Easterners. w The narrator finds Wheeler dozing in front of a dilapidated tavern in the decayed mining camp of Angels. Alone in this quotation we find some hints about the eastern opinion of the Westerners. w According to the East, they are lazy and live in run-down mining camps. Furthermore, the narrator describes Wheeler as fat and bald-headed, an expression of winning gentleness and simplicity. This proofs that he does not categorize Wheeler as a highly educated person, who cares for his appearance. w After being asked, Wheeler starts his discourse about a man called Jim Smiley, who is apparently not the one searched for, with a monotonous voice, lacking any enthusiasm but with an earnestness and sincerity, which showed me plainly that there was anything ridiculous or funny about this story. w At this point the reader might experience the same feeling of disappointment as the narrator, because Reverend Leonidas W. Smiley is obviously not identical with Jim Smiley. w There is also a contradiction in the names. The first one is a Reverend, a highly respected person of public life, an Easterner, who seems to be educated and wears an impressive first name with the mysterious initial W. w On the other side is Jim Smiley - a common first name and surname, a man from the West, who does not seem to be very important so far. w From now on, Wheeler takes over the part of the narrator by telling the story of Jim Smiley, who was a man addicted to betting. The narrative is now in vernacular English and with a greatly exaggerated, which is comical. w This implies a devaluation of the background narrative and a revaluation of the inner story. Smiley is even betting on the date of death of the wife of his friend Walker, which is a break of the convention and this again is comic. w Now a story about a slow mare and a little small bull-pup, called Andrew Jackson follows. The curiosity about the latter one is the name of the dog, because the 7th President of the United States, who was the first Westerner to become president and who advocated the right to vote for every State of the West in 1830 had had the same name. w Mr Jackson had been a gambler, a wild man, who had whores and spend much time in pubs. He was the cause for a scandal by entering the White House on the back of his horse. He wanted democracy of the common people and he reached his aim. w The narrator continues with a story about a frog, called Danl Webster. This might remind the reader of Daniel Webster, a senator who had great responsibility for the slavery law. In the Jumping Frog a common, uneducated frog wins against an educated frog and has the conclusion that an ordinary frog is equal to the educated frog with a great name- Danl Webster. w The senator Webster was educated as well and still the