Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), better known
by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American humorist, satirist, lecturer and writer. Twain
is most noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which has since been called
the Great American Novel, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He is also known for his
quotations. During his lifetime, Twain became a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists
and European royalty.
Twain enjoyed immense public popularity, and his keen wit and incisive satire earned
him praise from both critics and peers. American author William Faulkner called Twain "the
father of American literature."
Career overview
Twain began his career writing light, humorous verse but evolved into a grim, almost
profane chronicler of the vanities, hypocrisies and murderous acts of mankind. At mid-
career, with Huckleberry Finn, he combined rich humor, sturdy narrative and social criticism.
Twain was a master at rendering colloquial speech and helped to create and popularize a
distinctive American literature built on American themes and language. Many of Mark
Twain's works have been suppressed at times for various reasons. Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn has been repeatedly restricted in American high schools, not least for its
frequent use of the word "nigger", which was a common term when the book was written.
Unfortunately, a complete bibliography of his works is nearly impossible to compile
because of the vast number of pieces wrtten by Clemens (often in obscure newspapers)
and his use of several different pennames. Additionally, many believe that a large portion of
his speeches and lectures have been lost or simply were not written down; thus, the
collection of Clemens's works is an ongoing process. Researchers have rediscovered
published material by Twain as recently as 1995.
Early journalism and travelogues
Mark Twain’s first important work, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras
County, was first published in the New York Saturday Press on November 18, 1865. The
only reason it was published there was because his story arrived too late to be included in a
book Artemus Ward was compiling featuring sketches of the wild American West.
After this burst of popularity, Twain was commissioned by the Sacramento Union to
write letters about his travel experiences for publication in the newspaper, his first of which
was to ride the steamer Ajax in its maiden voyage to Hawaii, referred to at the time as the
Sandwich Islands. These humorous letters proved the genesis to his work with the San
Francisco Alta California newspaper, which designated him a traveling correspondent for a
trip from San Francisco to New York City via the Panama isthmus. All the while Twain was
writing letters meant for publishing back and forth, chronicling his experiences with his
burlesque humor. On June 8, 1867, Twain set sail on the pleasure cruiser Quaker City for
five months. This trip resulted in The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrims' Progress .

This book is a record of a pleasure trip. If it were a record of a solemn scientific expedition it
“ would have about it the gravity, that profundity, and that impressive incomprehensibility which are so
proper to works of that kind, and withal so attractive. Yet not withstanding it is only a record of a picnic,
it has a purpose, which is, to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East
if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries
before him. I make small pretense of showing anyone how he ought to look at objects of interest
beyond the sea – other books do that, and therefore, even if I were competent to do it, there is no
need. ”
In 1872, Twain published a second piece of travel literature, Roughing It, as a semi-
sequel to Innocents. Roughing It is a semi-autobiographical account of Twain's journey to
Nevada and his subsequent life in the American West. The book lampoons American and
Western society in the same way that Innocents critiqued the various countries of Europe
and the Middle East. Twain's next work kept Roughing It's focus on American society but
focused more on the events of the day. Entitled The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, it was not
a travel piece, as his previous two books had been, and it was his first attempt at writing a
novel. The book is also notable because it is Twain's only collaboration; it was written with
his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner.
Twain's next two works drew on his experiences on the Mississippi River. Old Times
on the Mississippi, a series of sketches published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875, featured
Twain’s disillusionment with Romanticism. Old Times eventually became the starting point
for Life on the Mississippi.
Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
Twain's next major publication was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which drew on
his youth in Hannibal. The character of Tom Sawyer was modeled on Twain as a child, with
traces of two schoolmates, John Briggs and Will Bowen. The book also introduced in a
supporting role the character of Huckleberry Finn, based on Twain's boyhood friend Tom
Blankenship.
The Prince and the Pauper, despite a storyline that is omnipresent in film and
literature today, was not as well received. Telling the story of two boys born on the same
day who are physically identical, the book acts as a social commentary as the prince and
pauper switch places. Pauper was Twain’s first attempt at fiction, and blame for its
shortcomings are usually put on Twain having not been experienced enough in English
society and the fact that it was produced after such a massive hit. In between the writing of
Pauper, Twain had started Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (which he consistently had
problems completing and started and completed another travel book, A Tramp Abroad,
which follows Twain as he travels through central and southern Europe.
 Twain’s next major published work, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, solidified him as
a noteworthy American writer. Some have called it the first Great American Novel. Finn was
an offshoot from Tom Sawyer and proved to have a more serious tone than its predecessor.
The main premise behind Huckleberry Finn is the young boy’s belief in the right thing to do
even though the majority of society believes that it was wrong. The book has become
required reading in many schools throughout the United States because Huck ignores the
rules and mores of the age to follow what he thinks is just (the story takes place in the
1850s where slavery is present). Four hundred manuscript pages of Huckleberry Finn were
written in the summer of 1876, right after the publication of Tom Sawyer. Some accounts
have Twain taking seven years off after his first burst of creativity, eventually finishing the
book in 1883. Other accounts have Twain working on Finn in tandem with The Prince and
the Pauper and other works in 1880 and other years. The last fifth of Finn is subject to much
controversy. Some say that Twain experiences—as critic Leo Marx puts it—a "failure of
nerve." Ernest Hemingway once said of Huckleberry Finn: “If you read it, you must stop
where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just
cheating.”[
Near the completion of Huckleberry Finn, Twain wrote Life on the Mississippi, which
is said to have heavily influenced the former book. The work recounts Twain’s memories
and new experiences after a 22-year absence from the Mississippi. The book is of note
because Twain introduces the real meaning of his pseudonym.
Later writing
After his great work, Twain began turning to his business endeavors to keep them
afloat and to stave off the increasing difficulties he had been having from his writing
projects. Twain focused on President Ulysses S. Grant's Memoirs for his fledgling
publishing company, finding time in between to write "The Private History of a Campaign
That Failed" for The Century Magazine. This piece detailed his two-week stint in a
Confederate militia during the Civil War. The name of his publishing company was Charles
L. Webster & Company, which he owned with Charles L. Webster, his nephew by marriage.
Twain next focused on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which featured
him making his first big pronouncement of disappointment with politics. Written with the
same "historical fiction" style of The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court showed the absurdities of political and social norms by setting them in the
court of King Arthur. The book was started in December 1885, then shelved a few months
later until the summer of 1887, and eventually finished in the spring of 1889.
Twain had begun to furiously write articles and commentary with diminishing returns
to pay the bills and keep his business intentions afloat, but it was not enough because he
filed for bankruptcy in 1894. His next large scale work, Pudd'nhead Wilson was written
rapidly, as Twain was furiously trying to stave off the bankruptcy. In the month from
November 12 to December 14, 1893, Twain wrote a staggering 60,000 words for the novel.
Critics have pointed to this rushed completion as the cause of the novel's rough
organization and constant disruption of continuous plot. There were parallels between this
work and Twain's financial failings, notably his desire to escape his current constraints and
become a different person.
This novel also contains the tale of two boys born on the same day (see The Prince
and the Pauper) who switch positions in life. Considering the circumstances of Clemens's
birth and Halley's Comet and his strong belief in the paranormal, it is not surprising that
these "mystic" connections recur throughout his writing.
Twain’s next venture was a work of straight fiction that he called Personal
Recollections of Joan of Arc and dedicated to his wife. Twain had long said that this was the
work of which he was most proud, despite the criticism he received for it. The book had
been a dream of his since childhood; he claimed that he had found a manuscript detailing
the life of Joan of Arc when he was an adolescent. This was another piece which Twain was
convinced would save his publishing company. His financial adviser, Henry Huttleston
Rogers, squashed that idea and got Twain out of that business altogether, but the book was
published nonetheless.
Twain’s wife died in 1904, and after an appropriate time Twain allowed himself to
publish some works that his wife, a de facto editor and censor throughout his life, had
looked down upon. Of these works, The Mysterious Stranger, which places the presence of
Satan, also known as “No. 44,” in various situations where the moral sense of humankind is
absent, is perhaps the best known. This particular work was not published in Twain’s
lifetime. There were three versions found in his manuscripts made between 1897 and 1905:
the Hannibal version, the Eseldorf version, and the Print Shop version. Confusion between
the versions led to an extensive publication of a jumbled version, and only recently have the
original versions as Twain wrote them become available.
Twain’s last work was his autobiography, which he dictated and thought would be
most entertaining if he went off on whims and tangents in non-sequential order. Some
archivists and compilers had a problem with this and rearranged the biography into a more
conventional form, thereby eliminating some of Twain’s humor and the flow of the book.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884 / 1885) (often shortened to Huck Finn) by
Mark Twain is commonly accounted as one of the first Great American Novels. It is also one
of the first major American novels ever written using Local Color Regionalism, or
vernacular, told in the first person by the eponymous Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, best friend of
Tom Sawyer and hero of three other Mark Twain books.
 The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the
Mississippi River, and its sober and often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly
racism. The drifting journey of Huck and his friend Jim, a runaway slave, down the
Mississippi River on their raft may be one of the most enduring images of escape and
freedom in all of American literature.
The book has been popular with young readers since its publication, and taken as a
sequel to the comparatively innocuous The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It has also been the
continued object of study by serious literary critics. Although the Southern society it satirized
was already a quarter-century in the past by the time of publication, the book immediately
became controversial, and has remained so to this day

Plot summary
Life in St. Petersburg
The story begins in fictional St. Petersburg, Missouri, on the Mississippi River. Two
young boys, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, have each come into a considerable sum
of money as a result of their earlier adventures (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer). Huck has
been placed under the guardianship of the Widow Douglas, who, together with her sister,
Miss Watson, are attempting to "sivilize" him (sic). Huck appreciates their efforts, but finds
civilized life confining. In the beginning of the story, Tom Sawyer appears briefly, helping
Huck escape at night from the house, past Miss Watson's slave, Jim. They meet up with
Tom Sawyer's self-proclaimed gang who plot to carry out adventurous crimes.
Huck's life is changed by the sudden appearance of his shiftless father, "Pap", an
abusive parent and drunkard. Although Huck is successful in preventing his Pap from
acquiring his fortune, Pap forcibly gains custody of Huck and the two move to the
backwoods where Huck is kept locked inside his father's cabin. Equally dissatisfied with
uncivilized life, Huck escapes from the cabin, elaborately fakes his own death, and sets off
down the Mississippi River.
The Grangerfords and the Shepherdsons
While living quite comfortably in the wilderness along the Mississippi, Huck happily
encounters Miss Watson's slave Jim on an island, and Huck learns that he has also run
away. The two team up and shortly after missing their destination, Cairo, Illinois (in a free
state to which Jim has planned to escape), Huck and Jim's raft is swamped by a passing
steamship, separating the two. Huck is given shelter by the Grangerfords, a prosperous
local family. He becomes friends with Buck Grangerford, a boy about his age, and learns
that the Grangerfords are engaged in a 30-year blood feud against another family, the
Shepherdsons.
 The vendetta comes to a head when Buck's sister, Sophia Grangerford, elopes with
Harney Shepherdson. In the resulting conflict, all of the remaining Grangerford males are
shot and killed, and upon seeing Buck's corpse, Huck is too devastated to write about
everything that happened. However, Huck does describe how he narrowly avoids his own
death in the gunfight, later reuniting with Jim and the raft and together fleeing farther south
on the Mississippi River.
The Duke and the King
Further down the river, Jim and Huck rescue two cunning grifters, who join Huck and
Jim on the raft. The younger of the two swindlers, a man of about thirty, introduces himself
as a son of an English duke and his father's rightful successor. The older one, about
seventy, then trumps the duke's claim by alleging that he is actually the "Lost Dauphin", the
son of Louis XVI and rightful King of France. The "Duke" and the "King" then force Jim and
Huck to allow them to travel on the raft, committing a series of confidence schemes on the
way south.
As these schemes unfold, Huck sees the attempted lynching of a southern
gentleman, Colonel Sherburn, after Sherburn kills a harmless town drunk. Sherburn faces
down the lynch mob with a loaded rifle and forces them to back down after an extended
speech regarding what he believes to be the essential cowardice of "Southern justice," the
lynch mob. (This vignette, which stands out as disconnected from the remaining plot, is
thought to represent Twain's own contradictory and misanthropic impulses — Huck, the
outcast, essentially flees from Southern society, while Sherburn, the gentleman, confronts it,
albeit in a brutally, destructive fashion.
The Duke and the King's schemes reach their climax when the two grifters
impersonate the brothers of Peter Wilks, a recently deceased man of property. Using an
absurd English accent, the King manages to convince most of the townspeople that he and
the Duke are Wilks's brothers recently arrived from England, and proceeds to liquidate
Wilks's estate. Huck is upset at the men's plan to steal the inheritance from Wilks's
daughters and actual brothers, as well as their actions in selling Wilks's slaves and
separating their families. To thwart their plans, Huck steals the money the two have
acquired and hides it in Wilks's coffin. Shortly thereafter, the two con men are exposed
when two other men claiming to be the Wilks's true brothers arrive. However, when the
money is found in Wilks's coffin, the Duke and the King are able to escape in the confusion,
rejoining Huck and Jim on the raft.
Jim's escape
After the four fugitives flee farther south on their raft, the King "captures" Jim and
sells his interest in any reward while Huck is away in a nearby town. Outraged by this
betrayal, Huck rejects the advice of his "conscience," which continues to tell him that in
helping Jim escape to freedom, he is stealing Miss Watson's property. Telling himself "All
right, then, I'll go to hell!", Huck resolves to free Jim.
Huck discovers, upon arriving at the house in which Jim is being held, that the King
has sold his supposed interest in the slave Jim for forty dollars to Silas Phelps, Tom
Sawyer's uncle. In a parallel to the con men's earlier scheme with the Wilks family, Silas's
wife, Aunt Sally, mistakes Huck for Tom himself, and Huck plays along, hoping to find a way
to free Jim. Shortly after, Tom himself arrives for a visit, and agrees to join Huck's scheme,
pretending to be his own half-brother, Sid Sawyer.
Huck reveals the secret of the Royal Nonesuch before the two rogues are able to set
their confidence game into motion. That night the Duke and King are captured by the
townspeople, and are tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail.
Rather than simply sneaking Jim out of the shed where he is being held, Tom
develops an elaborate plan to free him, involving secret messages, hidden tunnels, a rope
ladder sent in Jim's food, and other elements from popular novels, [7] including a note to the
Phelps warning them of an Indian tribe stealing their runaway slave. Huck and Jim go along
with the plan, but Tom is shot in the leg during the resulting pursuit. Rather than complete
his escape, Jim insists that Huck return to town and find a doctor to treat Tom. This is the
first time that Jim demands something from a white person; Huck explains this by saying "I
knowed he was white on the inside...so it was all right now." Jim and Tom are then captured
and brought back by the doctor.
Conclusion
After Jim's recapture, events quickly resolve themselves. Tom's Aunt Polly arrives
and reveals Huck's and Tom's true identities. Tom announces that Jim has been free for
months: Miss Watson died two months earlier and freed Jim in her will, but Tom chose not
to reveal Jim's freedom so he could come up with an elaborate plan to rescue Jim. Jim tells
Huck that Huck's father has been dead for some time and that Huck may return safely to St.
Petersburg. (Jim discovered this when he and Huck were on Jackson Island and came
upon part of a house drifting down stream. The dead body in the house, which Jim did not
let Huck see, was Huck's father.) In the final narrative, Huck announces that he is quite glad
to be done writing his story, and despite Tom's family's plans to adopt and "sivilize" him
(sic), Huck intends to flee west to Indian Territory.

Major Themes
In the tradition of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Twain wrote a novel that embodies the
search for freedom. Twain wrote during the post-Civil War period when there was an
intense white reaction against blacks. Twain took aim squarely against racial prejudice,
increasing segregation, lynchings, and the generally accepted belief that blacks were sub-
human. He "made it clear that Jim was good, deeply loving, human, and anxious for
freedom."
Throughout the story, Huck is in moral conflict with the received values of the society
in which he lives, and while he is unable to consciously refute those values even in his
thoughts, he makes a moral choice based on his own value of Jim's friendship and human
worth, a decision in direct opposition to the things he has been taught. Mark Twain in his
lecture notes proposes that "a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience,"
and goes on to describe the novel as "...a book of mine where a sound heart and a
deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat."