Mark Twain An American Treasure Essay Research

Mark Twain: An American Treasure Essay, Research Paper

Samuel Clemens, more popularly known as Mark Twain, was one of America.s

favorite authors and his stories intrigued the youth in all classifications of readers.

.People admired Mark Twain.s hardheaded exposures of human vitality, but responded

also to his unembarrassed sentiment, his compassion, and simple humility. (Unger

191). Many other people also admired his ability to effectively use various types of

dialect throughout several of his stories. Mark Twain.s realism helped people to see

the world as it really was, even if it was just through the eyes of young innocent boys.

.His adherence to American themes, settings and language set him apart from many

other novelist of the day and had a powerful effect on such later American writers as

Ernest Hemmingway and William Faulkner, both of whom pointed to Twain as an

inspiration for their own writing. (Encarta 1). Mark Twain was a renowned lecturer,

author, and humorist, but was perhaps one of America.s best treasures because he had

the ability to capture a disposition within his numerous characters and relate that spirit

to his reader.

Born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, Samuel Langhorne Clemens

moved to the small riverside town of Hannibal, Missouri, in 1839. His river home

provided him with many wonderful childhood memories which were the bases for most

of his stories. When Clemens was 12, he quit public school and became a printer.s

apprentice for a newspaper. A few years after his apprenticeship, he began to learn to

navigate steamboats on the Mississippi River. It was during this time, that he set forth

to write under the pen name of Mark Twain. This pseudonym, Mark Twain was .an

expression used by riverboat crews to indicate that the water at a given spot was two

fathoms deep and therefore easily navigable. (Twain 2).

Twain.s first story written in 1865 was originally entitled Jim Smiley and His

Jumping Frog, and was initially published in a New York newspaper. This story helped

to establish him as a recognizable author. The parable was so popular that he rewrote

it as his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. He used a

comic western tale which he heard while living and working in a mining camp in the

California gold country. His youthful experiences in the West helped broaden the

story.s aspect and made it quite popular to readers back East.

However, Twain.s earliest attempt at a novel was called The Guilded Age,

written in 1873. He wrote this novel with a co-author Charles Dunley Warner.

Unfortunately, this book did not sell very well, and was a complete failure. It did,

however, give .its name to the boom times, the post-Civil War age of unbridled

individualism and speculation, which it satirized. (McMichael 238).

However, when he wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876, it

was considered quite popular and it established Twain as a great American author.

Mark Twain wrote this novel about his personal .nostalgic recollections of his early

boyhood in Hannibal [which] stirred him to write his .boys. book,. Tom Sawyer and its

sequel Huckleberry Finn. (McMichael 238). The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was, for all

intended purposes, a children.s book about the ventures of a young boy and his best

friend. The adventures occurred in a small southern town on the Mississippi River

much like the community where Clemens was raised. In this tale, Twain used

symbolism by describing Injun Joe.s scary cave as an example of a labyrinth that the

boy.s had to overcome in order to escape from the evils of the world. Many people

today read this book and it reminds them of their delightful childhood memories of

playing in the river, getting into trouble, and being able to do it all over again the next

day. This book is a classic and is read by many people all over the world, young or old,

and it touches the imagination in everyone.

Furthermore, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was so popular that Twain wrote a

sequel. This story entitled The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn took five years to write

and was published in 1885. Nonetheless, this work did not feature much of the

previous novel.s main character, Tom Sawyer, but instead involved another character

aspect. The world of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn was such pure make-believe.

pirates, robbers, witches, and devils. as to see than most of The Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn with its shrewder realism and knotty problems of casuistry (Wecter

75). In this literary piece, Huck was escaping from the establishment of home with a

runaway slave named Jim and together they had many adventures on the Mississippi

River banks as they navigated the tribulations of life. Realism came in this narrative

when Jim and Huck realized the bitterness that people are capable of performing.

Although Twain wrote stories to entertain and amu

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