Mark Twain—Mirror of America(Excerpts)
Mark Twain was mostly remembered as the father of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. On the one hand, he was adventurous, patriotic, romantic, and humorous; and cynical, bitter, and sad caused by his profound personal tragedies.
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 .Young Mark Twain entered the geographic core —the Mississippi River in 1857 as a cub pilot. The cast of characters set before him in his new profession was rich and varied, which had acquainted him with every possible of human nature and strengthened all his writings.When railroads began drying up the demand for steamboat pilots,Mark Twain left the river country and tried soldiering for two weeks. Then he went west and succumbed to the epidemic of the gold silver fever. For eight months he flirted with the colossal but was rebuffed.
Broke and discouraged, he accepted a job as a reporter and began digging his way to regional fame as a newspaper reporter and humorist. In the spring of 1864, he boarded the stagecoach for San Francisco,a hotbed of hopeful young writers.Mark Twain honed with new writing muscles,but he had to leave the city for a while because of some scathing columns he wrote. His description of the rough-country settlers there ring familiarly in modern world accustomed to tend setting on the West Coast. In the winter of 1864-65in Angels Camp,he created well-known “ The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras Country” which makes him famous as “ the wild humorist of the Pacific slope”.
Two years later the opportunity came for him to take distinctly American look at the Old World. Upon his return to the States the book version of his travels, The Innocents Abroad, became the best seller.At the age of 36 Twain settled in Hartford,Connecticut. His best books were published were published while he lived there. From 1870 to 1876, he created the classic tale of American boyhood Tom Sawyer.Twain’s declaration of independence came from Huckleberry Finn.Twain found the ultimate expression of escape from the pace he lived by and often deplored. Huck’s raft flight presents a moving panorama for the exploration of American society.
Bitterness fed on the man who had made the world laugh.Personal tragedy haunted his entire life, his loved ones past away one bye one.The moralizing of his earlier writing had been well padded with humor.But the gloves came off with biting satire in his later writing.The last of his own illusions seemed to have crumbled near the end. Dictating his autobiography late in life, he commented with a crushing sense of despair on men’s final release from earthly struggle :”...the vanish from a world ...a wold which will lament them a day and forget them forever.”。