1. Mark Twain is known as the "Lincoln in American literature."
2. Introduction:
Mark Twain, a famous American writer and speaker, whose real name is Samuel Langhorne Clemens).
When Mark Twain was 12 years old, his father died, so he had to drop out of school and work as a factory worker. Later, he changed many professions and worked as a pilot, a miner and a journalist on the Mississippi River. Gradually, I started writing some interesting sketches and started my writing career.
Mark Twain wrote a large number of works throughout his life, covering novels, plays, essays, poetry and other aspects. In terms of content, his works criticize irrational phenomena or the ugliness of human nature, and express the strong sense of justice and concern for ordinary people of this writer who worked as a typesetter and sailor; in terms of style, experts And general readers agree that humor and irony are the characteristics of his writing.
Mark Twain is the founder of American critical realist literature, and most of his major works have been translated into Chinese. He experienced the development process of the United States from early capitalism to imperialism, and his thoughts and creations also showed a development stage from light ridicule to bitter irony to pessimism and world-weariness. In the early stage, he was famous for bitter irony, but in the later period, his language became more explicit and violent. . Known as "Lincoln in the history of American literature". He died on April 21, 1910, at the age of seventy-five, and was buried in Aymara, New York.
3. Literary characteristics
Mark Twain’s works have three characteristics:
First, he used extreme exaggeration on the basis of the Western humor tradition. artistic imagination.
The second characteristic is that the works often use the first person "I" as the protagonist. This "I" is like the protagonist in Chinese cross talk, playing various comic characters. Most of them are naive, honest, ignorant, simple-minded, and wishful thinking in everything, and the results often backfire. Mark Twain made a conscious decision to use an innocent and honest man as his protagonist. The protagonist always harbors some kind of ideal or some kind of simple idea, but he encounters obstacles everywhere in reality, which shows that his ideal is unrealistic and unworkable. The less he understands this, the more the contradiction between ideal and reality appears. the gap between.
The third characteristic is that humor contains irony. In his "Autobiography", he summarized his experience in writing humorous novels, saying, "Humor for humor's sake cannot last long. Humor is just a fragrance and tidbits. I always admonish others, which is why I have been able to persist for thirty years. ". "Thirty years" refers to the time from when he started writing to when he wrote his autobiography. What he means by "admonishing others" is that his novels contain the serious creative goal of suppressing evil and promoting good.
4. The origin of the pen name
Mark Twain’s real name was “Samuel Langham Clement”, and Mark Twain was his most commonly used pen name. It is generally believed that the pen name was derived from an early sailor's term meaning: water depth 3 feet. Samuel 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 (about 3.7 meters, 1 meter is about 1.852 meters) , which is a necessary condition for the safe navigation of ships. Another reason is that his captain, Sellers, was once a highly respected navigator. From time to time, he wrote sketches about the Mississippi River for newspapers under the pen name "Mark Twain."
In 1858, 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' death. He regretted his prank back then and was determined to make up for this mistake. So he inherited the pen name "Mark Twain" and named it "Mark Twain". This began his writing career. 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.