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    A Student's Guide to Mark Twain: Outstanding American Authors, #3
    A Student's Guide to Mark Twain: Outstanding American Authors, #3
    A Student's Guide to Mark Twain: Outstanding American Authors, #3
    Ebook159 pages1 hour

    A Student's Guide to Mark Twain: Outstanding American Authors, #3

    By MaryAnn Diorio

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    Mark Twain is an outstanding American author who lived and wrote during the 19th century and died in 1910. He is most famous for two novels: The Adventures of Tom Sawyher and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain's greatest contributions to American style reside in his humorist approach and his unique use of language. In A Student's Guide to Mark Twain, Dr. MaryAnn Diorio has provided a rich resource for understanding and appreciating the works of this great author.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTopNotch Press
    Release dateFeb 22, 2019
    ISBN9780930037321
    A Student's Guide to Mark Twain: Outstanding American Authors, #3
    Author

    MaryAnn Diorio

    MaryAnn Diorio writes award-winning fiction from a quaint small town in New Jersey where neighbors still stop to chat while walking their dogs, families and friends still gather on wide, wrap-around porches, and the charming downtown still finds kids licking lollipops and old married folks holding hands. A Jersey girl at heart, MaryAnn loves Jersey diners, Jersey tomatoes, and the Jersey shore. You can learn more about her and her writing at maryanndiorio.com.

    Read more from Mary Ann Diorio

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      Book preview

      A Student's Guide to Mark Twain - MaryAnn Diorio

      A Student’s Guide to

      MARK

      TWAIN

      Mary Ann L. Diorio, Ph.D.

      TopNotch Press

      PO Box 1185

      Merchantville, NJ 08109

      Dedication

      To my precious husband, Dom—

      my knight in shining armor—

      Copyright © 2008 by Mary Ann L. Diorio

      All rights reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

      ISBN 0-930037-32-4

      Mark Twain Photo: By Mathew Brady [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

      Copyright

      1   Safe Water

      An Introduction to the Life and Works of Mark Twain

      2   Early Writings

      Examining The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1865)

      3   The Traveler’s Life

      Examining The Innocents Abroad (1869)

      4   Go West!

      Examining Roughing It (1872)

      5   Age of Disillusion

      Examining The Gilded Age (1873)

      6   Recaptured Youth

      Examining The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)

      7   A Writer for All Times

      Examining A Tramp Abroad (1880) and The Prince and the Pauper (1882)

      8   That Remarkable River

      Examining Life on the Mississippi (1883)

      9   An American Masterpiece

      Examining Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

      10   Final Works

      Examining A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)

      Chronology

      Chapter Notes

      Glossary

      Major Works by Mark Twain

      Further Reading and Internet Addresses

      Index

      SAFE WATER

      An Introduction to the Life and Works of Mark Twain

      What is in a name? For Samuel Clemens, the answer to that question marked a pivotal point in not only his writing career, but also in the annals of American literature. As a young man, Clemens trained and served as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River. Because of the dangerous nature of the river, pilots needed continually to measure the depth of the water in order to ensure that their boats would not go aground. The river channel was narrow and did not follow a straight path. Using a sounding line, riverboat pilots would measure the depth of the water to ascertain its safety. As long as the water was two fathoms deep (approximately 12 feet), the river was considered safe for navigating the boat. The term used to indicate this safe depth was mark twain, meaning mark two fathoms or, by extension, safe water.

      Clemens chose to use this nautical term as his pseudonym. The name stuck and garnered him much attention not only as a writer, but also as an exceptionally witty humorist and speaker. Today, the name Mark Twain has become synonymous with the sounding of the American heart, whose depth, in Twain’s literature, has not been found wanting.

      A sounding line (also called a lead line) is a length of thin rope with a lead weight on its end. A sounding line is used to measure the depth of a river or lake, especially while navigating a boat.
      PSEUDONYM—A fictitious name used by an author when, for various reasons, he or she does not wish to use his or her real name.
      HUMORIST—A writer who specializes in writing humor.

      Mark Twain was born on November 30, 1835, in the rural town of Florida, Missouri. Born Samuel Clemens, the sixth child of John and Jane Clemens spent the first four years of his life in this small Missouri town. In 1839, the family moved to the nearby town of Hannibal, located along the Mississippi River. Hannibal set the stage for Twain’s literary career, which reached its apex with the publication of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

      COMMON THEMES

      Twain’s works abound with themes that reflect the era and the culture in which he lived. Among the most common of these themes are:

      Freedom vs. Confinement

      Racism and Slavery

      Intellectual and Moral Education

      The Hypocrisy of Civilized Society

      Superstition in an Uncertain World

      HYPOCRISY—The act of pretending to be someone that one is not.
      PATHOS—A quality that arouses sympathy or pity.

      Twain’s characters reflect these themes with both humor and pathos. Huck Finn, for example, reflects the recurring theme of freedom vs. confinement. The son of an alcoholic father and a widowed guardian, Huck gets involved in numerous adventures that symbolize his search and struggle for freedom.

      CHARACTER TYPES

      Twain’s characters are well-rounded and replete with human foibles. Having read Twain’s works, who does not remember the colorful people who populate his stories?

      Like other authors before him, Twain drew from his life experiences to create memorable characters that resonate with life. As he himself states in the preface to Tom Sawyer regarding the character of Huckleberry Finn:

      Huck Finn is drawn from life; Tom Sawyer also, but not from an individual—he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew, and therefore belongs to the composite order of architecture.¹

      Other characters drawn from Twain’s circle of family and friends include Aunt Polly (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer), drawn from Twain’s own mother; Becky Thatcher (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer), based on a girl who lived across the street from the Clemens family in Hannibal; and Huckleberry Finn (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), based on a real boy whom Twain knew named Tom Blankenship. Although critic Shelley Fisher Fishkin notes that Twain makes clear in his autobiography that Tom Blankenship was a poor-white outcast child from Hannibal,² Fishkin, nevertheless, asserts that compelling evidence indicates that the model for Huck Finn’s voice was a black child instead of a white one.³

      COMMON LITERARY DEVICES

      SYMBOL—Something that stands for or suggests something else.
      SYMBOLISM—A literary device using symbols.
      ALLUSION—The act of referring to something.
      CONTRAST—A literary device used to emphasize differences.
      JUXTAPOSITION—The act of placing side by side for the purpose of comparing or contrasting.

      In his writings, Twain employs the literary devices of humor, symbolism, allusion, and contrast through juxtaposition. His humor is the vehicle for presenting his political, philosophical, and religious views. It is also the means whereby he encourages his readers to consider their own responses to the issues he presents. Twain uses humor in much the same way a mother gives her child a spoonful of sugar to help remove the bad taste of medicine. The humor makes the message more palatable.

      Critic Pascal Covici calls Twain America’s greatest humorist.⁴ Covici goes on to say:

      To Mark Twain, humor—originally, perhaps, an end in itself—became a tool, a technique, for the artist; it became a means to a variety of ends which have in common the clarification of a reader’s vision of himself and of the nature of the society, and of the cosmos, around him.⁵

      That Twain effectively used humor to clarify his reader’s vision of life would be difficult to dispute. Indeed, his humor served as a filter for conveying the deeper truths of life.

      Another literary device Twain uses is symbolism. A key example of symbolism is found in Huck and Jim’s raft in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. According to critic David E. Sloane:

      The raft is a haven where an ideal inter-racial friendship can develop apart from the corrupting influence of ‘sivilization. It is a hidden world … a world of absolute freedom….⁶

      The raft thus serves as a microcosm for Twain’s views regarding the influence of environment on the pursuit of freedom.

      The Mississippi River also serves as a major symbol in both The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. To Twain, the Mississippi represented a microcosm of life. Its ebb and flow mirrored the ebb and flow of life. The towns along its shores were populated by people with the same hopes and dreams as those who lived along other shores of other rivers. The great river was but a small reflection of the great river of life itself.

      MICROCOSM—The smaller version of a larger system.

      Twain employs the literary device of allusion in his treatment of the character of Huckleberry Finn. Through Huck, Twain obliquely presents his own views regarding the meaning of life. Referring to Huck’s allusions to the Bible, critic Randy Cross writes that Huck’s:

      … biblical references, both explicit and covert, are not the childish misunderstandings of an ignorant, fourteen-year-old Huck, but the beliefs of his iconoclastic forty-eight-year-old creator."⁷

      Typology refers to the study of types. A type is a symbol of something to come, such as an event in the Old Testament that symbolizes an event to come in the New Testament.

      Kelly Anspaugh concurs with Cross’s observations about biblical allusions, referring to them as examples of biblical typology, an interpretive procedure that was very common among early and mid-Victorian bible readers and sermonizers.⁸

      Yet another literary device is Twain’s use of contrast through juxtaposition, particularly in the relationship between Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. David Sloane comments on this contrast when he writes, Huck is characteristically cautious and realistic, making him the foil for Tom’s enthusiastic romanticism.⁹ Indeed, as Laurie Champion notes:

      The contrast between Tom Sawyer, who is the child of respectable parents, decently brought up, and Huckleberry Finn, who is the child of the town drunkard, not brought up at all, is made distinct by a hundred artistic touches, not the least natural of which is Huck’s constant reference to Tom as his ideal of what a boy should be.¹⁰

      In juxtaposing the two boys, Twain is actually presenting the conflict between two social orders. That the author ever resolves this conflict is debatable.

      NARRATIVE STYLE

      Twain’s narrative style often belies his intent. His

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