Mark Twain – a pen name of Samuel Clemens – was a two months premature baby, so underweight and ugly that his mom stated, “When I saw him I could see no promise in him.” As a kid, he was an uneasy soul who wandered even during sleep, a student who keep on fantasizing daily instead of concentrating on his studies until the point that he dropped out of school at the age of 12. After he grown up- and become a well-known man – he was still not gentle and unsavory, to such an extent that when he asked his companions to send the proposal from him to his life partner’s family, most of his friends recommended that he should better run with him. However, he was a sensitive person, whose energetic emotions, and youthful impressions both frightened and preserved him all through his lifetime. He turned into a loving spouse and a delicate and caring father that when his oldest little girl headed off to college, he desired to convey her clothing to make sure he could be close to her. Every one of his interests was overwhelming, and they molded his story, for good and for sick (Powers, pp. 118).
Samuel Clemens, the actual Mark Twain, was born to a family that appeared to be bound to struggle for its living. His dad, in spite of the fact that a brilliant and self-instructed man, wasted his chance and strength on a progression of failed business plans. But, regardless of the family’s financial struggles, Twain’s childhood gave him material to feast upon for whatever is left of his days. He spent his developing years in Hannibal on the banks of the Mississippi and in quarters for the slaves where a slave named Uncle Dan’l (a model for Jim in “Huckleberry Finn”) recounted stories and pleased the young man with his dialect and expository abilities. Youthful Sam, in any case, never stopped for long – not at any phase of his life. When he was 18 he had already efficiently journeyed 2,000 miles, lived in three unique East Coast urban communities, and functioned as a daily paper journalist. Twain diverted the undertakings of his harsh and-tumble life into new organizations jumping up in America. He started composing for daily papers exactly when they went far and sufficiently wide to win a talented nearby author a national group of onlookers. He was – indeed – pushed onto the address organize when Americans rushed to such excitement. Also, he moved into book distributing similarly as a developing US white collar class made the business feasible. Twain’s momentous mind settled him as a well-known writer. However, his persisting interest was much more unpredictable.
Mark Twain’s Positive Attributes
Twain Style of Writing
Samuel Clemens had a unique American writing style. He always has a conversational storytelling style in his writings and preferred humorous yet ironic style. He has always been an entertainer even if there was something serious to write. Americans have a tradition of humorous tall tales, and he was a part of it. He wrote a wide range of entertaining fiction related to his experience of his time. During the industrial revolution, he wove beautifully the developing landscape of America as well as the basics of rural life into his fiction that can be read like a biography. The characters he made in his fiction were sparkling and realistic that even today they are America’s favorite heroes.
Twain has written that what country boy has never gone out in streets bare-footed with his gang to visit some fishing hole or to spend hours with his dog. His writing portrays a strong character of a boy that goes outside and keep on hopping with his dog and a fishing pole. His writing was so intense that the reader could see the projection on his mind. His writing paints the image of every word in the mind of his readers (Peter, pp. 448-464).
In one of his writing, Twain has portrayed the friendship of a white child (Finn) and a black child (Jim). When he wrote about this friend, it was not possible even to imagine it; although it did happen later on Twain gave a whistle blow and a positive gesture to the interracial friendship. Twain has set to pen and paper a lasting version of what it resembled to experience childhood in an extremely countryside yet additionally rapidly industrializing America. He mixed with it numerous encounters that are basic to Americans around then, for example, the fusion of blacks into white society. He passes on the cruelty of bringing home the bacon off of the land, notwithstanding while doing as such includes the best of hardships. Characters now and again relocate a large number of miles for better openings, and they did it without a cutting-edge vehicle or a plane ticket
In “Life on the Mississippi” and in different books, a repeating subject is the wonder of the steamboat, an astounding new specialty that is frequently observed thundering along the waterway toward a gathering of stunned spectators who probably thought it was a type of ocean serpent. A genuine wonder of the mechanical age and new and stunning to country-side concepts of Americans, this picture is shown over and over by Twain in his stories and books.
Father of American Literature
William Faulkner gave the title of “Father of American Literature” to Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain. It was no doubt a well-deserved title as when one looks at his classic tales like ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ and ‘The Adventures of Sawyer’; it seems that these are none other than perfections. He has set the standards for childhood adventure. Furthermore, his writing indicates his hatred for oppression, hypocrisy, and slavery; and his respect for women. Even the great author of 20th century Ernest Hemingway claimed that all the modern literature of America has come from the Twain’s book named ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ His lessons have great impact even today. Moreover, he was not only a creative writer of fiction who humorously dealt with the social issues of his era. He has reported the growth of American culture while traveling the country as a journalist. So as a traveler and a journalist, he has provided the American identity in his remarkable fictions. As a ‘Father of American Literature,’ he has portrayed the most chaotic period, in his unique and prolific style. His work was now doubted a true piece of artifacts (Kolb, pp.1870-1910).
The uniqueness of Mark Twain
Mark Twain was a great humanitarian as evident from his writings. He highlighted the inequalities of his times including racism, social snobbery, human exploitation, and his hatred for slavery and oppression. He was a true reflector of his society and mirror the real society of that time as he was neither a romanticist nor an idealist. He helped spawn the westerns and mysteries through his wonderful travel writings.
He was having the ability to see minute details in his surroundings and then to transform it into words. His narration ability was so profound and contain cinematic detail in it, even if he is talking about a running hound. He had the talent to raise controversial issues with the addition of humor into it. In his writings, he has used the people who were socially outcast and reviled by providing them a sense of identification, an awareness to identify their dilemmas, and the adversities of their lives, so by impacting the social thinking of people.
He was an influential writer and was a father of great writers such as Upton Sinclair and Steinbeck who were political protestors and rightly known by their work of bringing the dark, ugly face of American thinking of social class to the whole world. He was uneducated, yet he also influenced the writings of Dreiser. He supported writers, assisted them, and is known as the master of all genres which is fantastic.
His writing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was influential writing and its character Tom was his greatest discovery as a writer. Finding Tom Sawyer was not easy, and according to Cox (p. 128), Twain has to exploit, discover, and exhaust the myth of himself. This was the different writing that is focusing on the Tom as the central figure instead Twain himself as he was only an observer. Even the ‘Twain’ itself was his creation, the trend then continues with the chronicler of The Innocents Abroad and then with Tom Sawyer. It was his writing power that, in this book, he sat behind as an observer and allows the character to do the play by humoring and satirizing.
Twain has self-deprecating style in some of his writings, as he has expressed what was on his mind by fooling himself. For example in one of his essays, “A Presidential Candidate,” he embarks to make himself a leading Presidential applicant by telling the audience reading his essay about everything in the begging terrible about himself, thinking that his rivals “will be not able to rake up anything against him that no one at any point heard previously”. He ignores his self-importance by overstating his adverse qualities and devious deeds to the point of silliness, at last deciphering his uneasiness among needy individuals into a stage that promoters were nourishing the regular American workers to cannibals. At last, this isn’t an individual reflection concerning the storyteller yet a judgment of the American political process and its interest in identifying outrage.
Mark Twain’s Negative Attributes
The writings of Samuel Clemens aka Twain were quite profound, but he also had some criticism on it due to different reasons. There was a time when Twain’s work was restricted from being published. The main reason was that his mouth was so foul it was once said vulgarity was so much a piece of him that when he swore it “not real swearing.” His composition, in any case, was diluted by the period in which he lived. Quite a bit of his work would have been unpublishable had he said what he needed to state, so he limited his substance and agreed to dashes between some key letters for the irreverence that survived his proofreader’s pen. In any case, there are a couple of times his dirtier side appeared.
Once he wrote farting and sex so openly “1601: Conversation, as It Was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors.” The story starts with the Queen of England hearing somebody tear a gigantic fart, which at that point exploded into an exchange regarding the matter. The discussion, in the long run, swung toward virginity. Normally, the work was restricted for a long time after Twain composed it (Sutrina, p. 18).
Mistakes in Twain Writing Style
A mistake made by many writers is their inability to move from one genre to another. The career of Twain was an illustration. In spite of the fact that Twain could make a move from travelogues and short stories to long tales and novel, yet he flopped in his endeavors to compose for the stage. His first endeavor at playwriting may have been Colonel Sellers (1874), a play in light of a novel, The Gilded Age (1873), which Twain had coauthored with Charles Dudley Warner. There is some motivation to trust that Twain did not compose the play. In any case, regardless of whether Twain wrote it, and in spite of its being a money-related achievement, Colonel Sellers was hardly a play. As Goldman (1985) contends, the lead on-screen character, John Raymond, “did more for the play than the play did for Raymond….The critics were unanimous in praising the comic abilities and originality of the chief actor while criticizing the play as ‘slender’ and as a ‘grotesque sketch” (pp. 120– 121).
Goldman (1985) included, ‘slender’ is a kind assessment of the content. Except for Sellers, no character has any profundity or definition. The incidental lecturing is out of key with the tone of the piece, and the discourse is neither predictable nor controlled” (p. 121). Twain’s next endeavor at composing for the stage was Ah Sin (1877), composed cooperatively with Bret Harte. Goldman (1985) portrayed it as “an ineffectively built joke-packed with exaggerations” (p. 121). It was arranged, yet it fizzled, and the generation was shut. Twain attempted one more coordinated effort, Colonel Sellers as a Scientist (1884), this time with William Dean Howells. The play had a keep running for one night before it was pulled back. Most commentators who examine the play take note of that Raymond, who had influenced an accomplishment of the early Sellers to play, rejected the part, in the fundamental because the character of Colonel Sellers appeared a “maniac” (Goldman, 1985, p. 123). In spite of the fact that Twain did not arrange any further preparations, Goldman reports that he continued to compose plays. Simon Wheeler, Amateur Detective (1887) “was judged unplayable by makers” (1985, p. 124). Four more endeavors, Is He Dead?, an adjustment of Tom Sawyer, an emulate called Love on the Rail, and Meisterschaft additionally neglected to discover producers. Plainly, as a play writer, Twain was a disappointment. However, Root-Bernstein (1999) has contended that genre shifting is one method of expanding inventiveness: “Field changers… tend to have more noteworthy generally speaking and viable efficiency contrasted and people who remain inside their specialized topic” (p. 463). In any case, Root-Bernstein’s illustrations are of built up specialists and researchers who utilize changing fields as a method for reestablishment. Conversely, Goldman (1985) contended that Twain saw playwriting as an approach to “get rich immediately” (p. 127). It is positively tempting to credit Twain’s inability to a hired fighter state of mind. However, Twain saw the majority of his written work as a business. At last, it might have been more essential, as Goldman (1985) himself proposed, that Twain “did not know or declined to acknowledge that a novel describes while a play orders” (p. 127).
Conclusion
Despite the criticism on Mark Twain’s writings and his writing style, he was the greatest of all writers and impacted others writers and the history by his writings. He challenged the bitter realities of his time and wrote satirically and humorously in his fictions. Over the hundred years of the time gap, and a lot of addition in the world of American writing, he is still considered the great writer of American Literature who knew how to influence others through his illustrations.
References
Cox, J. (1966) Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor. Princeton: Princeton.
Goldman, R. (1985) Mark Twain as a playwright. In R. Giddings (Ed.), Mark Twain: A sumptuous variety. New York: Vision and Barnes and Noble.
Kolb, H. K. (1986) Mere Humor and Moral Humor: The Example of Mark Twain. American Literary Realism, pp. 1870-1910.
Peter, S. (2002) Seven Recent Commentaries On Mark Twain. Studies In The Novel. Vol34, pp. 448-464.
Powers, R. (2005) Mark Twain: A Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Sutrina, J. J. (1951) Literary criticism contained in the works of Mark Twain. Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 2854.
