Impact of Mark Twain

In his autobiography, published posthumously, Mark Twain tells the reader that he speaks from the grave "so that I can speak thence freely, because a man wishing to write a book about the privacies of his life - one which he knows will be read while he is still alive - shrinks from speaking his whole frank mind - a wholly impossible effort for a human being" (Twain xxvi).

Mark Twain was born in Florida, Missouri in 1835. Twain drew on his boyhood along the Mississippi River for characters and incidents in his best work. For example, he says in his Mississippi Writings that while all the incidents described therein happened either to him or to a friend he knew, Tom Sawyer is a "combination of the characters of three boys whom I knew, and therefore belongs to the composite order of architecture" (Twain Preface). Twain's formal schooling ended early, after which he learned the printing t

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se societies as "they slipped back into a varnished river culture" that never was as varnished as Twain portrays it (Budd, 1985: 12). In addition Budd (12) states that, readers can relate to the books and learn a "frontier thesis" in American history based on the "vision of the West as a haven of Democracy, individualism and pioneer ingenuity." Twain new it was a heightened reality his readers wanted to pay their ten cents for, not the unadorned, often harsh truth. He also could have been giving this varnished rendition of the culture because in his youth he was still idealistic and full of confidence, enough to feel that life would always feel so varnished. A careful and conscious artist, Twain became a master of the technical devices of exaggeration, irreverence, and deadpan seriousness. For example, Huck Finn is the ultimate loner. He is sentenced to wander and never to belong. Perhaps this is the sense of isolation the young unmarried Twain felt as he wandered all around the country, belonging to no one. Twain uses exaggeration to win our sympathy, for example, he has Huck tell the Widow Douglas that "I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead" (Miller 108). It seems that Twain must have known a lot of lonesome peop
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Approximate Word count = 1820
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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