Traditional Culture Encyclopedia - Travel guide - Information about Mark Twain Urgent!

Information about Mark Twain Urgent!

Mark Twain, formerly known as Samuel Langhorne Clemens; (November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910) He is an American humorist, novelist, writer, and famous speaker. Although his wealth is not much, his humor, wit and fame have not diminished, making him one of the most famous people in the United States. He had a wide circle of friends, including William Dean Howell, Booker T. Washington, Nikola Tesla, Helen Keller, and Henry Roger. He has been hailed as: Lincoln in the history of literature. Helen Keller once said: "I like Mark Twain - who wouldn't like him? Even God will love him, give him wisdom, and draw a rainbow of love and faith in his heart." William Faulkner called Mark Twain "the first truly American writer from whom we all descend." He died in 1910, at the age of seventy-five, and was buried in Emmara, New York. < /p>

Penname

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"Mark Twain" is his most commonly used pen name. It is generally believed that this pen name originated from his early days as a sailor. In his career, Samuel (aka "Mark Twain") once worked as a navigator. When measuring the water depth with his partner, his partner shouted "Mark Twain!", which means "two marks", that is, the water is two inches deep. (1 xun is about 1.8 meters), which is a necessary condition for the safe navigation of ships.

Another reason is that his captain, Sellers, was a highly respected navigator who from time to time wrote sketches for newspapers introducing the anecdotes of the Mississippi River, signed "Mark Twain".

In 1859, Captain Sellers published an article predicting that the city of New Orleans would be flooded. The naughty Samuel decided to make a joke on him, so he imitated his style and wrote a very biting satirical sketch. Unexpectedly, this game article actually deeply hurt the old captain's heart. The old captain gave up writing and the pen name "Mark Twain" disappeared from the newspaper.

Four years later, Samuel, who became a reporter, learned the sad news of Captain Sellers's death. He regretted his prank back then and was determined to make up for this mistake, so he inherited "Mark Tut". "Wen" was the pen name, and he started his famous writing career with this.

But there is also a theory that when he was wandering in the West, he often bought two drinks in a hotel and asked the bartender to write "two marks" on the bill. However, it is impossible to verify whether it is true or false, or whether both are false. His real name is "Samuel Creggens".

Life

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Childhood

Mark Twain was born in Missouri, USA on November 30, 1835 A poor lawyer family in rural Florida. He is the sixth child in a family of seven children. He had only two siblings to survive childhood, his brother Orion Clemens (July 17, 1825 – December 11, 1897) and his sister sister, Pamela (September 19, 1827 - August 31, 1904). His father was a local judge with a meager income and financial difficulties. While little Samuel was in school he had to work. His father died when he was twelve years old, and he began an independent working life. He first worked as an apprentice in a printing house, worked as a newspaper delivery person and typesetter, and later worked as a sailor and helmsman on the Mississippi River. The poverty he lived in as a child and his long working career not only accumulated material for his future literary creation, but also forged a righteous heart. His mother Margaret died when he was four, and his brother Benjamin (8 June 1832 – 12 May 1842) died three years later. His other brother, Pleasant (1828-1829), lived only three months before Twain was born. Following these brothers and sisters who were older than Mark Twain, Twain had another younger brother - Henry Clemens (July 13, 1838 - June 21, 1858). When Twain was 4 years old, his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a port city on the Mississippi River, and this became the basis for his later books "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "The Adventures of Urchin". Inspiration from the city of St. Petersburg. At that time, Missouri was a slave state in the Confederacy, and the young Twain began to learn about slavery, which would become a later theme in his adventure novels.

Mark Twain was colorblind, which inspired his witty banter in social circles. In March 1847, when Twain was 11 years old, his father died of pneumonia. The following year he became a printer's apprentice. In 1851, he became a typesetter, also contributed articles, and began to write drafts for the "Hannibal Journal" founded by his brother Orion.

When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. At the age of 22, Twain returned to Missouri. During the trip down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, the steamship pilot "Bixby" asked Twain to become a steamship pilot for life. This profession was the third highest-paying profession in the United States at that time, with a monthly salary of 250 US dollars (equivalent to today's $155,000).

Because ships at that time were made of very flammable wood, lights were not allowed to be turned on at night. Navigators need to have a good understanding of the ever-changing river and can therefore avoid the hundreds of harbors and wooded areas along its banks. Twain spent more than two years meticulously studying 2,000 meters of the Mississippi River before he received his pilot's license (1859). During his pre-licensing training, Twain convinced his brother, Henry Clemens, to work with him on the Mississippi River. Henry died on June 21, 1858, due to the explosion of the ship on which Henry was working. Twain felt extremely guilty about this and felt responsible for the rest of his life. However, he continued to work on the river and remained a pilot until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, which curtailed traffic on the Mississippi River.

Travel and Family

Missouri was a slave state and considered by most to be part of the South, but it did not join the Union. When the war began, Twain and his friends joined a Union militia unit (described in the 1885 short story "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed") and fought in a war effort , one man was killed in that war. Twain found that he simply could not bear to kill anyone, so he left. His friend joined the Confederate Army; Twain went to join his brother Olean, who was appointed secretary to the governor of Nevada and to govern the West.

Twain and his brother spent more than two weeks traveling across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains by coach and coach. They arrived at the Mormon society in Salt Lake City. These experiences became a major part of the book "Hard Times" and provided information for "The Calgary Frog". Twain's journey ended in the silver mines of Virginia City, Nevada. There he became a miner.

After giving up his job as a miner, Twain worked for the Enterprise, a newspaper in Virginia City.

Twain next traveled to San Francisco, California, where he continued to work as a reporter and began giving lectures. He met other writers such as Brett Harder. Once he was assigned to the state of Hawaii and this became his first speaking engagement. In 1867, a local newspaper offered a steamship trip to the Mediterranean.

During his journeys to Europe and the Middle East, he wrote his famous 1869 collection of travel letters, The Idiot's Travels. He also met Charles Langdon and saw a photo of Langdon's sister Olivia Langdon. Twain fell in love with her immediately. They met in 1868, became engaged a year later, and married in 1870 in Emmara, New York City. Olivia gave birth to a son, Langdon, but Langdon died of diphtheria at 19 months old.

In 1871, the Twain family moved to Hartford, Connecticut. There Olivia gave birth to three daughters: Susie, Clara and Jean. Twain also became a good friend of writer William Dean Howell.

Twain later traveled to Europe again, which was described in the 1880 book "Wandering Overseas." In 1900, he returned to the United States to pay off the debts owed to his old company. Twain's marriage lasted 34 years until Olivia's death in 1904.

In 1906, Twain began writing his own autobiography for the North American Monthly Review. A year later, Oxford University awarded him a doctorate in literature.

Twain outlived both Jean and Suzy. He went through a period of melancholy, which began when his beloved daughter Susie died of meningitis in 1896. Olivia's death in 1904 and Jean's death on December 24, 1909 made Twain even more melancholy.

Writer's career

Mark Twain's first masterpiece, "The Famous Frog of Calgary," was first published in the "New York Saturday Paper" on November 18, 1865. The only reason the work was published there was because it was completed too late to be included in Artemus Ward's collection of special writings on the American West.

After this, the Salimando Federal sent Mark Twain to Hawaii, then known as the Sandwich Islands, as a correspondent, and sent letters to the Federal about things there. He later wrote based on these humorous letters when he was working at San Francisco's Californian newspaper, which sent him from San Francisco to New York City via the Panama Canal as a roving reporter. At that time, he continued to send letters to newspapers for publication, sarcastically and humorously recording what he saw and heard. On June 8, 1867, Twain took a yacht to Philadelphia, where he would stay for five months. This trip led to the creation of Idiot Travel.

In 1872, Twain published his second travel literature, "Hard Times," as a sequel to "A Fool's Journey."

The content of "Hard Times" is a semi-autobiographical account of Twain's journey to Nevada and his later life in the American West. This book satirizes the United States and Western society with "idiots" criticism of many countries in Europe and the Middle East. Twain's next work, "Hard Times," focused on American society. The following "The Gilded Age" is not a work of travel literature, because the two previous books were both works of travel literature, and this was the first time he wrote a novel. The book is also famous because it is the only book Twain co-wrote; it was written by Twain and his neighbor, Charles Dudley Warner.

Twain's next two books were both about his experiences on the Mississippi River. "Old Days on the Mississippi" was a series of sketches published in "The Atlantic Monthly" in 1875. The most distinctive feature is Twain's awakening to romanticism. Twain wrote "Life on the Mississippi" after "Old Days". Twain later wrote "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," a book about his childhood in Hannibal. Twain imitated his own character as a child and created the character of Tom Sawyer. This book also introduces a character named Huckleberry Finn as a supporting character.

Although the storyline of "The Prince and the Beggar" often appears in many movies and literary works today, it is not generally accepted. This was Twain's first attempt to write about "beggars". The disadvantage was that Twain did not have enough experience in British society. While writing "The Prince and the Pauper", Twain also started writing "The Wandering Boy" and also completed another travelogue, "Wandering Overseas." "Wandering Abroad" is Mark Twain's travelogue to Central and Southern Europe.

Twain's next published work was "The Wandering Boy". After the publication of this book, he became more famous as a great American writer. "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" is the sequel to "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", with a more serious atmosphere than the latter. The book became required in most schools in the United States because Huck gave up on obeying the rules, which is what many people his age thought (Huck's story is set in the 1850s, when slavery still existed). In the summer of 1876, after the release of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", Twain handwritten about 400 pages of the story content of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer".

After Twain's wife died in 1904, he was able to publish books that his wife, his censor and editor, did not like. One of these books, "The Mysterious Stranger," was not published during Twain's lifetime, so three versions of the manuscript have been found between 1897 and 1905. These three versions confused the publication of the work, and only now is the version originally written by Twain available.

Twain's last work was his oral autobiography. Some custodians and editors reorganized the autobiography into a more general format, and some of Twain's humorous lines were deleted.

Financial Issues

The friendship between Mark Twain and Henry Roger in his later years. Twain made a lot of money from publishing his books, but he wasted a lot of it through inappropriate investments, mostly in new inventions. This included an innovative iron hoop, a new steam engine, collotypes (machines used to engrave printing plates), and a typesetting machine. Finally, there was his publishing house, which initially succeeded but then failed in selling Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs.

The credit for Twain's work being able to be written should also go to one of his new friends, because he solved Twain's financial difficulties. In 1893, he began a 15-year friendship with financier and Standard Oil chief Henry Roger. Roger first filed for bankruptcy for Twain. Roger then transferred the copyright to Twain's book to Twain's wife, Olivia, to prevent creditors from seizing the copyright. Finally, Roger returned all of Twain's money to his creditors. Twain then embarked on a speaking tour around the world, paying off all his debts.

The evaluation of him by later generations

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The leader of modern humor literature!

A world-class writer representing American literature!

He is a naughty boy with an innocent heart and a knight holding a sword for justice!

Catalog of Works

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"Running for Governor"

"The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (1876 )

"The Beggar Prince" (1882)

"The Wandering Naughty Boy" (1884)

"The Famous Frog of Ka County"

< p>"One Million Pounds"

"The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg"

"Thirty Thousand Dollars Inheritance"

"A Case Within a Case" < /p>

"Asceticism"

"The Story of a Bad Boy"

"The Incident of Eating People on the Train"

"The Job I Resigned Recently" The Facts"

"Tennessee News"

"The Story of Good Boys"

"How I Edited the Agricultural Newspaper"

"The Incident of the Bulk Beef Contract"

"My Experience as Secretary to a Senator"

"The Adventures of a Yankee in Connecticut" (1889)

"Goldsmith's Friend Goes Abroad Again"

"Mysterious Visit"

"A True Story"

"The French Duel"

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"Strange Experience"

"The Story of a Californian"

"Is He Still in the World"

"On the Road with the Changers of Customs" "

"A Dog's Narrative"

"The Gilded Age"

"The Five Great Gifts of Man"

"A Fool's Journey"

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"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"

"Life on the Mississippi"