【素材】Unit3文本MarkTwain(人教)

1、Mark TwainSamuel Langhorne ClemensMark Twain, detail of photo by Mathew Brady, February 7, 1871November 30, 1835(1835-11-30)BornFlorida, Missouri, United StatesDiedApril 21, 1910 (aged 74)Redding, ConnecticutPen nameMark TwainOccupationWriter, lecturerNationalityAmericanGenresFiction, historical fic

2、tion, children s literature, non-fiction, travel literature,satire, essay, philosophical literature, social commentary, literary criticismNotable work(s)Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom SawyerInfluencesshowArtemus Ward, Charles Dickens, Thomas Paine, Robert Henry Newell, Josh Bi

3、llings, Alexander Carlyle, 1 Pliny, Herodotus, Plutarch, William Dean Howells, Robert Browning2InfluencedshowKurt Vonnegut, Gore Vidal, Ernest Hemingway, WilliamFaulkner, H. L. Mencken, Hunter S.Thompson, Hal Holbrook, Jimmy Buffett, Ron Powers, Ralph Ellison, Ken Kesey, Robert A. Heinlein1Signature

4、Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835April 21, 1910),3 better known by the penname Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. Twain is most noted for his novelsAdventures of Huckleberry Finn, which has since been called the Great American Novel,4 andThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He is ex

5、tensively quoted.56Duringhis lifetime,Twainbecame a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists and European royalty.Twain enjoyed immense public popularity, and his keen wit and incisive satire earned him praisefrom both criticsand peers. Americanauthor WilliamFaulkner called Twain the father ofA

6、merican literature.7BiographyEarly lifeSamuel Langhorne Clemens, Mark Twain, was born in Florida, Missouri on November 30, 1835to a Tennessee country merchant, John Marshall Clemens (August 11, 1798March 24, 1847),and Jane Lampton Clemens (June 18, 1803 October 27,1890).8 Hewas the sixth of sevenchi

7、ldren. Only three of his siblings survived childhood. His brother Orion lived from July 17, 1825 to December 11, 1897. His brother Henry, who died in a riverboat explosion, lived from July 13, 1838 to June 21, 1858, and his sister Pamela lived from September 19, 1827 to August 31, 1904).His sister M

8、argaret (May 31, 1830August 17, 1839) died when Twain was three years old, andhis brother Benjamin (June 8, 1832 May 12, 1842) died three years later. Another brother,Pleasant (18281829), died at the age of six months.9 He was born two weeks after the closestapproach to Earth of Halley s Comet (see

9、1835 comment).When Twain was four, his family moved to Hannibal,10 a port town on the Mississippi River that served as the inspiration for the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of TomSawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.11 At that time, Missouri was a slave state in the Union,

10、and young Twain became familiar with the institution of slavery, a theme he later explored in his writing.In March 1847, when Twain was 11, his father died of pneumonia.12 The next year, he became aprinter s apprentice. In 1851, he began working as a typesetter and contributor of articles and humoro

11、us sketches for the Hannibal Journal, a newspaper owned by his brother, Orion. When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis andCincinnati. He joined the union and educated himself in public libraries in the evenings, finding wider sources of info

12、rmation than he would have at a conventional school.13 At 22, Twainreturned 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; it was a richly rewarding occupation with wages set at $250 per month,

13、14 roughly equivalent to $155,000 a year today.The library of the Mark Twain House, which features hand-stenciled paneling, fireplaces fromIndia, embossed wallpapers and an enormous hand-carved mantel that the Twains purchased inScotland (HABS photo)A steamboat pilot needed a vast knowledge of the e

14、ver-changing river to be able to stop at any of the hundreds of ports and wood-lots along the river banks. Twain meticulously studied 2,000 miles (3,200 km) of the Mississippi for more than two years before he received his steamboat pilotlicense in 1859. While training, Samuel convinced his younger

15、brother Henry to work with him. Henry was killed on June 21, 1858, when the steamboat he was working on, the Pennsylvania,exploded. Twain had foreseen this death in a detailed dream a month earlier,15 which inspired his interest in parapsychology; he was an early member of the Society for Psychical

16、Research.16 Twain was guilt-stricken over his brother s death and held himself responsible for the rest of hislife. He continued to work on the river and served as a river pilot until the American Civil Warbroke out in 1861 and traffic along the Mississippi was curtailed.Travels and familyMissouri w

17、as a slave state and considered by many to be part of the South, and was represented inboth the Confederate and Federal governments during the Civil War. Years later, Twain wrote a sketch, The Private History of a Campaign That Failed, which claimed he and his friends hadbeen Confederate volunteers

18、for two weeks before disbanding their company.17 Twain joined his brother, Orion, who had been appointed secretary to the territorial governor of Nevada, James W. Nye, and headed west.1874 engraving of TwainTwain and his brother traveled for more than two weeks on a stagecoach across the Great Plain

19、sand the Rocky Mountains, visiting the Mormon community in Salt Lake City along the way. Theseexperiences inspired Roughing It, and provided material for The Celebrated Jumping Frog ofCalaveras County. Twain s journey ended in the silver-miningtown of VirginiaCity, Nevada,where he became a miner.17T

20、wain failedas a miner and found work at a VirginiaCitynewspaper, the TerritorialEnterprise.18On February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous travelaccount LETTERFROM CARSON- re: Joe Goodman; party at Gov. Johnsons; music withMark Twain.19Twain then traveled to San Francisco, California, where he continued

21、 as a journalist and beganlecturing.He met other writers such as Bret Harte, Artemus Ward and Dan DeQuille.Anassignment in Hawaii became the basis for his first lectures.20 In 1867, a local newspaper funded a trip to the Mediterranean. During his tour of Europe and the Middle East, he wrote a popula

22、r collection of travel letters which were compiled as The Innocents Abroad in 1869.Twain met Charles Langdon, 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 Y

23、ork.20 She came from a wealthy but liberal family, andthrough her he met abolitionists, socialists, principled atheists and activistsfor women s rightsand social equality,includingHarrietBeecher Stowe, FrederickDouglass and the utopiansocialist William Dean Howells.21The couple lived in Buffalo, New

24、 York from 1869 to 1871. Twain owned a stake in the Buffalo Express, and worked as an editor and writer. Their son Langdon died of diphtheria at 19 months. In 1871,22 Twain moved his family to Hartford, Connecticut, where starting in 1873 he arranged the building of a dramatic house for them, which

25、local admirers saved from demolition in 1927and eventually turned into a museum focused on him. There Olivia gave birth to three daughters:Susy (1872-1896), Clara (1874-1962)23 and Jean (1880-1909). The couples marriage lasted 34years, until Olivia s death in 1904.During his years in Hartford, Twain

26、 became friends with fellow author William Dean Howells.Later life and deathMark Twain in his gown (scarlet with grey sleeves and facings) for his DLitt degree, awarded to him by Oxford UniversityTwain made a second tour of Europe, described in the 1880 book A Tramp Abroad. His tour included a visit

27、 to London where, in the summer of 1900, he was the guest of newspaper proprietor Hugh Gilzean-Reid at Dollis Hill House. Twain wrote of Dollis Hill that he had neverseen any place that was so satisfactorily situated, with its noble trees and stretch of country, andeverything that went to make life

28、delightful, and all within a biscuit s throw of the metropolis of the world.24 He returned to America in 1900, having earned enough to pay off his debts.In 1906, Twain began his autobiography in the North American Review. Oxford University awarded him a Doctorate in Letters a year later.Twain outliv

29、ed Jean and Susy. He passed through a periodof deep depression, which began in1896 when his favorite daughter Susy died of meningitis. Olivias death in 1904 and Jeans deathon December 24, 1909 deepened his gloom.25In 1909, Twain is quoted as saying:26“I came in with Halley s Comet in 1835. It is com

30、ing again next year, and I expect togo out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I dontgo out withHalley s Comet. The Almightyhas said, no doubt:Nowhere are these twounaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together. ”His predictionwas accurate Twaindied

31、ofa heart attack on April21, 1910 in Redding,Connecticut, one day after the comet s closest approach to Earth (see Halleys Comet, 1835 entry).Upon hearing of Twain s death, President William Howard Taft said:2728“Mark Twain gave pleasure real intellectual enjoyment to millions, and his works will co

32、ntinue to give such pleasure to millions yet to come. His humor was American, but he was nearly as much appreciated by Englishmen and people ofother countries as by his owncountrymen.He has made an enduringpart ofAmerican literature.”Twain is buried in his wife s family plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in

33、Elmira, New York. His grave is marked by a 12-foot monument, placed there by his surviving daughter, Clara.29 Life as a writerCareer overviewTwain began his career writing light, humorous verse but evolved into a grim, almost profane chronicler of the vanities, hypocrisies and murderous acts of mank

34、ind. At mid-career, with Huckleberry Finn, he combined rich humor, sturdy narrative and social criticism. Twain was amaster at rendering colloquial speech and helped to create and popularize a distinctive Americanliterature built on American themes and language. Many of Twains works have been suppre

35、ssedat times for various reasons. Adventures of HuckleberryFinn has been repeatedly restricted inAmerican high schools, not least for its frequent use of the word nigger, which was a common term when the book was written.Unfortunately, a complete bibliography of his works is nearly impossible to com

36、pile because ofthe vast number of pieces written by Twain (often in obscure newspapers) and his use of severaldifferent pennames. Additionally, many believe that a large portion of his speeches and lectureshave been lost or simplywere not written down; thus, the collectionof Twain s works is anongoi

37、ng process. Researchers have rediscovered published material by Twain as recentlyas1995.30Early journalism and traveloguesCabin in which Twain wrote Jumping Frog of Calaveras, located on Jackass Hillin TuolumneCounty.31 Historical marker and interior view available.Twain s first important work, The

38、Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, was first published in the New York Saturday Press on November 18, 1865. The only reason it was published there was because his story arrived too late to be included in a book Artemus Ward was compiling featuring sketches of the wild American West.After t

39、his burst of popularity, Twain was commissioned by the Sacramento Union to write letters about his travel experiences for publication in the newspaper, his first of which was to ride thesteamer Ajax in its maiden voyage to Hawaii, referred to at the time as the Sandwich Islands. These humorous lette

40、rs proved the genesis to his work with the San Francisco Alta Californianewspaper, which designated him a traveling correspondent for a trip from San Francisco to New York City via the Panama isthmus. All the while Twain was writing letters meant for publishingback and forth, chronicling his experie

41、nces with his burlesque humor. On June 8, 1867, Twain set sail on the pleasure cruiser Quaker City for five months. This trip resulted in The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrims Progress.“This book is a record of a pleasure trip. If it were a record of a solemn scientific”expedition it would have a

42、bout it the gravity, that profundity, and that impressive incomprehensibility which are so proper to works of that kind, and withal soattractive. Yet not withstanding it is only a record of a picnic, it has a purpose, which is, to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the Ea

43、st if helooked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in thosecountries before him. I make small pretense of showing anyone how he ought to lookat objects of interest beyond the seaother books do that, and therefore, even if Iwere competent to do it, there is no need.In

44、1872, Twain published a second piece of travel literature, Roughing It, as a semi-sequel toInnocents. Roughing It is a semi-autobiographical account of Twains journey to Nevada and hissubsequent life in the American West. The book lampoons American and Western society in thesame way that Innocents c

45、ritiqued the various countries of Europe and the Middle East. Twainsnext work kept Roughing It s focus on American society but focused more on the events of the day.Entitled The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, it was not a travel piece, as his previous two books hadbeen, and it was his first attempt at

46、 writing a novel. The book is also notable because it is Twainsonly collaboration; it was written with his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner.Twain s next two worksdrew on his experiences on the MississippiRiver. Old Timeson theMississippi, a series of sketches published in the AtlanticMonthlyin 1875, f

47、eatured Twain sdisillusionment with Romanticism. Old Times eventually became the starting point for Life on the Mississippi.Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry FinnTwain s next major publication was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which drew on his youth in Hannibal. The character of Tom Sawyer was modeled on

48、Twain as a child, with traces of two schoolmates, John Briggs and Will Bowen. The book also introduced in a supporting role the character of Huckleberry Finn, based on Twain s boyhood friend Tom Blankenship.The Prince and the Pauper, despite being a storyline that is omnipresent in film and literatu

49、re today, was not as well received. Telling the story of two boys born on the same day who are physically identical, the book acts as a social commentary as the prince and pauper switch places. Pauper wasTwain s first attempt at fiction, and blame for its shortcomings is usually put on Twain for hav

50、ingnot been experienced enough in English society, and also on the fact that it was produced after such a massive hit. In between the writing of Pauper, Twain had started Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which he consistently had problems completing32) and started and completedanother travel book, A

51、Tramp Abroad, which follows Twain as he travels through central and southern Europe.Twain s next major published work,Adventuresof Huckleberry Finn,solidifiedhim as anoteworthy Americanwriter. Some have called itthe firstGreat AmericanNovel. HuckleberryFinn was an offshootfrom Tom Sawyer and proved

52、tohave a more serious tone than itspredecessor. The main premise behindHuckleberry Finn is the young boy s beliefin the rightthing to do even though the majority of society believes that it was wrong. The book has become required reading in many schools throughout the United States because Huck igno

53、res the rules and mores of the age to follow what he thinks is just (the story takes place in the 1850s where slavery is present). Four hundred manuscript pages of Huckleberry Finn were written in the summer of1876, right after the publication of Tom Sawyer. Some accounts have Twain taking seven yea

54、rs offafter his first burst of creativity, eventually finishing the book in 1883. Other accounts have Twainworking on Huckleberry Finn in tandem with The Prince and the Pauper and other works in 1880and other years. The last fifth of Huckleberry Finn is subject to much controversy. Some say that Twa

55、in experiences as critic Leo Marx puts it a failure of nerve. Ernest Hemingway once saidof Huckleberry Finn:“ If you read it, you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys.That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. 33”Near the completion of Huckleberry Finn, Twain wrote Life on the Mississippi, which is said tohave heavily influenced the former book.30 The work recounts Twain s memories and new experiences aft