What kind of stories did mark twain wrote about

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For off-site access, click here. Thank you for visiting Publishers Weekly. There are 3 possible reasons you were unable to login and get access our premium online pages. Perhaps it was the romantic visionary in him that caused Clemens to recall his youth in Hannibal with such fondness. The gamblers, stevedores, and pilots, the boisterous raftsmen and elegant travelers, all bound for somewhere surely glamorous and exciting, would have impressed a young boy and stimulated his already active imagination.

And the lives he might imagine for these living people could easily be embroidered by the romantic exploits he read in the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, and others. Those same adventures could be reenacted with his companions as well, and Clemens and his friends did play at being pirates, Robin Hood, and other fabled adventurers.

Among those companions was Tom Blankenship, an affable but impoverished boy whom Twain later identified as the model for the character Huckleberry Finn. There were local diversions as well—fishing, picnicking, and swimming.

It is not surprising that the pleasant events of youth, filtered through the softening lens of memory, might outweigh disturbing realities. However, in many ways the childhood of Samuel Clemens was a rough one. Death from disease during this time was common. His sister Margaret died of a fever when Clemens was not yet four years old; three years later his brother Benjamin died.

When he was eight, a measles epidemic potentially lethal in those days was so frightening to him that he deliberately exposed himself to infection by climbing into bed with his friend Will Bowen in order to relieve the anxiety. A cholera epidemic a few years later killed at least 24 people, a substantial number for a small town. Even before that year, however, continuing debts had forced them to auction off property, to sell their only slave, Jennie, to take in boarders, even to sell their furniture.

Apart from family worries, the social environment was hardly idyllic. Missouri was a slave state, and, though the young Clemens had been reassured that chattel slavery was an institution approved by God, he nevertheless carried with him memories of cruelty and sadness that he would reflect upon in his maturity.

Then there was the violence of Hannibal itself. In January Clemens watched a man die in the street after he had been shot by a local merchant; this incident provided the basis for the Boggs shooting in Huckleberry Finn.

Two years later he witnessed the drowning of one of his friends, and only a few days later, when he and some friends were fishing on Sny Island, on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, they discovered the drowned and mutilated body of a fugitive slave. He lived sparingly in the Ament household but was allowed to continue his schooling and, from time to time, indulge in boyish amusements. Nevertheless, by the time Clemens was 13, his boyhood had effectively come to an end.

In the oldest Clemens boy, Orion, returned from St. Louis, Mo. A year later he bought the Hannibal Journal, and Sam and his younger brother Henry worked for him. Some of those early sketches, such as The Dandy Frightening the Squatter , appeared in Eastern newspapers and periodicals. Epaminondas Adrastus Perkins. Having acquired a trade by age 17, Clemens left Hannibal in with some degree of self-sufficiency. For almost two decades he would be an itinerant labourer, trying many occupations.

He worked briefly as a typesetter in St. Louis in before traveling to New York City to work at a large printing shop. From there he went to Philadelphia and on to Washington , D. During his time in the East, which lasted until early , he read widely and took in the sights of these cities.

He was acquiring, if not a worldly air, at least a broader perspective than that offered by his rural background. Orion had moved briefly to Muscatine, Iowa , with their mother, where he had established the Muscatine Journal before relocating to Keokuk, Iowa, and opening a printing shop there. Sam Clemens joined his brother in Keokuk in and was a partner in the business for a little over a year, but he then moved to Cincinnati, Ohio , to work as a typesetter.

Still restless and ambitious, he booked passage in on a steamboat bound for New Orleans , La. Instead, he saw a more immediate opportunity and persuaded the accomplished riverboat captain Horace Bixby to take him on as an apprentice.

Because Bixby was an exceptional pilot and had a license to navigate the Missouri River and the upper as well as the lower Mississippi, lucrative opportunities several times took him upstream. On those occasions, Clemens was transferred to other veteran pilots and thereby learned the profession more quickly and thoroughly than he might have otherwise.

The profession of riverboat pilot was, as he confessed many years later in Old Times on the Mississippi, the most congenial one he had ever followed. He met and fell in love with Laura Wright, eight years his junior. The courtship dissolved in a misunderstanding, but she remained the remembered sweetheart of his youth. He also arranged a job for his younger brother Henry on the riverboat Pennsylvania. The boilers exploded, however, and Henry was fatally injured. Clemens was not on board when the accident occurred, but he blamed himself for the tragedy.

His experience as a cub and then as a full-fledged pilot gave him a sense of discipline and direction he might never have acquired elsewhere. Before this period his had been a directionless knockabout life; afterward he had a sense of determined possibility. He continued to write occasional pieces throughout these years and, in one satirical sketch, River Intelligence , lampooned the self-important senior pilot Isaiah Sellers, whose observations of the Mississippi were published in a New Orleans newspaper.

The Civil War severely curtailed river traffic, and, fearing that he might be impressed as a Union gunboat pilot, Clemens brought his years on the river to a halt a mere two years after he had acquired his license. He returned to Hannibal, where he joined the prosecessionist Marion Rangers, a ragtag lot of about a dozen men.

After only two uneventful weeks, during which the soldiers mostly retreated from Union troops rumoured to be in the vicinity, the group disbanded. A few of the men joined other Confederate units, and the rest, along with Clemens, scattered.

Twain would recall this experience, a bit fuzzily and with some fictional embellishments, in The Private History of the Campaign That Failed In that memoir he extenuated his history as a deserter on the grounds that he was not made for soldiering. Like the fictional Huckleberry Finn, whose narrative he was to publish in , Clemens then lit out for the territory. Clemens submitted several letters to the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, and these attracted the attention of the editor, Joseph Goodman, who offered him a salaried job as a reporter.

He was again embarked on an apprenticeship, in the hearty company of a group of writers sometimes called the Sagebrush Bohemians, and again he succeeded. The Nevada Territory was a rambunctious and violent place during the boom years of the Comstock Lode, from its discovery in to its peak production in the late s. Nearby Virginia City was known for its gambling and dance halls, its breweries and whiskey mills, its murders, riots, and political corruption.

He was often indignant and prone to expose fraud and corruption when he found them. This was a dangerous indulgence, for violent retribution was not uncommon. In February Clemens covered the legislative session in Carson City and wrote three letters for the Enterprise.

Clemens seized it. It would be several years before this pen name would acquire the firmness of a full-fledged literary persona, however. Already he was acquiring a reputation outside the territory. Some of his articles and sketches had appeared in New York papers, and he became the Nevada correspondent for the San Francisco Morning Call.

In , after challenging the editor of a rival newspaper to a duel and then fearing the legal consequences for this indiscretion, he left Virginia City for San Francisco and became a full-time reporter for the Call.

Finding that work tiresome, he began contributing to the Golden Era and the new literary magazine the Californian, edited by Bret Harte. After he published an article expressing his fiery indignation at police corruption in San Francisco, and after a man with whom he associated was arrested in a brawl, Clemens decided it prudent to leave the city for a time.

He went to the Tuolumne foothills to do some mining. It was there that he heard the story of a jumping frog. The story was widely known, but it was new to Clemens, and he took notes for a literary representation of the tale. When the humorist Artemus Ward invited him to contribute something for a book of humorous sketches, Clemens decided to write up the story. Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog arrived too late to be included in the volume, but it was published in the New York Saturday Press in November and was subsequently reprinted throughout the country.

The next few years were important for Clemens. He continued to write for newspapers, traveling to Hawaii for the Sacramento Union and also writing for New York newspapers, but he apparently wanted to become something more than a journalist.

He went on his first lecture tour, speaking mostly on the Sandwich Islands Hawaii in Controversial, brilliant, and ever witty, the man who would shape American literature was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in a small riverside town in Missouri in More than a century later, Mark Twain remains one of the best writers that America has ever produced.

As an illustrious novelist, distinguished essayist, popular travel writer, beloved humorist, and astute literary critic, Twain casts an intimidatingly long shadow on any American author who dares to follow him. Not to mention, he was ridiculously prolific — writing 28 books and upwards of some short stories! Discover the perfect book for you. Takes 30 seconds! The piece that first catapulted Twain into the national eye is, in truth, not so much a book as a short story.

Eventually, the indefatigable storyteller lands on a yarn about a jumping frog — hence the title of the piece. Growing up, Twain was big on travel and took many opportunities to gallivant around the world: a passion that shows up in spades in this early work.

Trips to the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Vatican, and even the Sphinx in Egypt create comic set pieces, even while Twain delights in pointing out many a politically incorrect cultural peculiarity in every country. Though The Innocents Abroad is categorized as nonfiction, the reality is that it lies somewhere between fact and fiction. Looking for something new to read? Trust real people, not robots, to give you book recommendations.

Or sign up with an email address. Many of his later hallmarks are evident here, from his witty observations about otherwise trivial moments to the presence of a galloping, entertaining plot. You probably already recognize that the Gilded Age refers to the three decades that followed the Civil War, but what you might not know is that t his is the book that coined the term.

And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. A coming-of-age novel for the ages, this is the story of Tom Sawyer: an aspiring troublemaker, idyllic romantic, devilish orphan, and young dreamer. He carries out his antics under the weary eye of his Aunt Polly, all the while endeavoring to romance Becky Thatcher, the new girl in town and daughter of the local judge.

But even a murder and a funeral — his own, by the way — cannot curb his mischief-making. Though it might be eclipsed these days by The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , this unrepentantly cracking book is still an American classic.

In many ways, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is even more wry than the former in part due to the creative license that its third-person point of view affords Twain. Imbued with such exuberance, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer perfectly captures both the innocence and irreverence of youth, seen through the eyes of a boy who embodies boyhood best of all.

In and , Twain embarked on a second month trip through Central Europe and the Alps. As discerning readers might be able to tell, Twain was once an innocent, now a tramp. However, he is one of the most endearing tramps in this uproariously epic book, which serves up an entertaining travelogue and social critique of the world all in one.

But it is still a triumph in the realm of travel writing, and a formative piece of commentary in its own right. For a book that needs no introduction, many people rush to regard it. Most critics call it the Great American Novel. Huckleberry Finn, a thirteen-year-old boy, is kidnapped from town by the local drunkard — his own father.