Samuel clemens why mark twain

It gained international reputation and was bestseller in many countries. Huckleberry, a boy, learns about human nature's evil side as well as its kind side.

As a result of his close friendship with a black man who is escaping slavery, Huck also must confront the conflict between individua l intuition about what is right and the prevailing views of society on the subject. Twain introduced a new style of writing with the vernacular style.

As first American writer he succeeded in Europe and made American Authors a bit more independent and self-confident. Now, Europeans showed more respect and attention dor the literature across the ocean. By the early s, however, his financial situation was in poor shape as a result of failures in investing in automatic typesetting machines, and the cost of living an extravagant lifestyle. In order to save him and the family for bankruptcy he sold the house in Hartford in , and took the family to live in Europe.

Throughout the decade, the Clemens family lived at various addresses in France, Germany and Italy. Twain, who was used to traveling and a prosperous life got help for his financial situation from Standard Oil executive, Henry Rogers. This financial aid must have been enormous, because Clemens could afford several temporary returns to America.

As well, he and his family, traveled through the entire world. They've been to all continents and visited many Islands, such as several pacific islands, New Zealand, Fiji and others. It is amazing that, in spite of their not very comfortable situation they traveled through the entire world.

The good reputation in many foreign countries and the brightness of Mark Twain should have supported this luck in the s. His wife died in Florence in The death influenced Twain's life massively. Then, he decided to go back to America. In he dines with Theodore Roosevelt in the White House and in the same year he celebrates his 70th birthday. The last life years he enjoyed as a famous American, who was invited to many national festivals and federal buffets.

As typical for Twain, he still frequently changed his home. So he lived in several major cities along the east coast in the last years alive. This should remain his last trip to Europe. He received the honorary degree of Oxford for his life work and the published Christian Science.

The older Twain became very much involved in social and political issues. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies.

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Related Stories. Already a print subscriber? The loss broke his heart, and adding to his grief, he was out of the country when it happened. His youngest daughter, Jean, was diagnosed with severe epilepsy. In , when she was 29 years old, Jean died of a heart attack. For many years, Twain's relationship with middle daughter Clara was distant and full of quarrels. In June , while Twain traveled, Livy died after a long illness. Kent Rasmussen. But absent or not, throughout 34 years of marriage, Twain had indeed loved his wife.

Twain became somewhat bitter in his later years, even while projecting an amiable persona to his public. In private he demonstrated a stunning insensitivity to friends and loved ones. He wrote a fair amount but was unable to finish most of his projects. His memory faltered. Twain suffered volcanic rages and nasty bouts of paranoia, and he experienced many periods of depressed indolence, which he tried to assuage by smoking cigars, reading in bed and playing endless hours of billiards and cards.

Twain is remembered as a great chronicler of American life in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Writing grand tales about Sawyer, Finn and the mighty Mississippi River, Twain explored the American soul with wit, buoyancy and a sharp eye for truth. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us!

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A pall settled over the Clemens household; they would not celebrate birthdays or holidays for the next several years. As an antidote to his grief as much as anything else, Clemens threw himself into work. He wrote a great deal he did not intend to publish during those years, but he did publish Following the Equator , a relatively serious account of his world lecture tour.

Palpable tokens of public approbation are the three honorary degrees conferred on Clemens in his last years—from Yale University in , from the University of Missouri in , and, the one he most coveted, from Oxford University in When he traveled to Missouri to receive his honorary Doctor of Laws, he visited old friends in Hannibal along the way. He knew that it would be his last visit to his hometown.

Clemens had acquired the esteem and moral authority he had yearned for only a few years before, and the writer made good use of his reinvigorated position. He began writing The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg , a devastating satire of venality in small-town America, and the first of three manuscript versions of The Mysterious Stranger. None of the manuscripts was ever completed, and they were posthumously combined and published in He also started What Is Man?

He began to dictate his autobiography, which he would continue to do until a few months before he died. The description may or may not be apt. At any rate, even though the worst of his financial worries were behind him, there was no particular reason for Clemens to be in a good mood. The family, including Clemens himself, had suffered from one sort of ailment or another for a very long time.

In his daughter Jean was diagnosed with epilepsy, and the search for a cure, or at least relief, had taken the family to different doctors throughout Europe. She was violently ill in , and for a time Clemens was allowed to see her for only five minutes a day. Removing to Italy seemed to improve her condition, but that was only temporary. She died on June 5, The story chronicles in tenderly comic ways the loving relationship between Adam and Eve.

He would have yet another occasion to publish his grief. His daughter Jean died on Dec. The Death of Jean was written beside her deathbed. It is true that Clemens was bitter and lonely during his last years. In —07 he published selected chapters from his ongoing autobiography in the North American Review. Judging from the tone of the work, writing his autobiography often supplied Clemens with at least a wistful pleasure.

These writings and others reveal an imaginative energy and humorous exuberance that do not fit the picture of a wholly bitter and cynical man. He moved into his new house in Redding, Conn. It is an uneven but delightfully humorous story, one that critic and journalist H.

Mencken ranked on a level with Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi. Little Bessie and Letters from the Earth both published posthumously were also written during this period, and, while they are sardonic, they are antically comic as well. Clemens thought Letters from the Earth was so heretical that it could never be published. The letters did present unorthodox views—that God was something of a bungling scientist and human beings his failed experiment, that Christ, not Satan, devised hell, and that God was ultimately to blame for human suffering, injustice, and hypocrisy.

Twain was speaking candidly in his last years but still with a vitality and ironic detachment that kept his work from being merely the fulminations of an old and angry man.

Clara Clemens married in October and left for Europe by early December. Jean died later that month. Clemens was too grief-stricken to attend the burial services, and he stopped working on his autobiography.

Perhaps as an escape from painful memories, he traveled to Bermuda in January By early April he was having severe chest pains. His biographer Albert Bigelow Paine joined him, and together they returned to Stormfield. Clemens died on April The last piece of writing he did, evidently, was the short humorous sketch Etiquette for the Afterlife: Advice to Paine first published in full in Heaven goes by favor.

If it went by merit, you would stay out and the dog would go in. Only Clara survived him. As a humorist and as a moralist, Twain worked best in short pieces.

In A True Story, told in an African American dialect, Twain transformed the resources of the typically American humorous story into something serious and profoundly moving. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg is relentless social satire; it is also the most formally controlled piece Twain ever wrote. The originality of the longer works is often to be found more in their conception than in their sustained execution.

Twain was not the first Anglo-American to treat the problems of race and racism in all their complexity, but, along with that of Herman Melville, his treatment remains of vital interest more than a hundred years later. His ability to swiftly and convincingly create a variety of fictional characters rivals that of Charles Dickens. And his mastery of spoken language, of slang and argot and dialect, gave these figures a voice.

Howells, who had known most of the important American literary figures of the 19th century and thought them to be more or less like one another, believed that Twain was unique. Twain will always be remembered first and foremost as a humorist, but he was a great deal more—a public moralist, popular entertainer, political philosopher, travel writer, and novelist.

Perhaps it is too much to claim, as some have, that Twain invented the American point of view in fiction, but that such a notion might be entertained indicates that his place in American literary culture is secure.

But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born two months prematurely on November 30, , in tiny Florida, Missouri, and remained sickly and frail until he was 7 years old.