Mark Twain作者、写作风格及代表作简介

Mark Twain's (1835-1910) real name was Samuel Clemens."Mark Twain", which means"watermark two", was a call used by sailors on the Mississippi to warn shipmates that they were coming into shallow water. Mark Twain was a great American writer, and he was also a famous speaker. Twain was born in Florida and he was not a healthy baby. In fact, he was not expected to live through the first winter. But with his mother's tender care, he managed to survive. As a boy, he didn't like to go to school, and he constantly ran away from home. He used to be a journey man printer at the age of 18 and a pilot in the Mississippi River. His first novel, The Gilded Age, written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, was an artistic failure.

In 1867, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867), a collection of short stories, makes Mark Twain's national reputation now well established as "the wild humorist of the Pacific slope". Twain's humour are always hoax, puns, tall tales, straight-faced exaggeration, anti-climax and tricks of travesty and invective. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was an immediate success as "a boy's book" when it was published; its sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which Twain wrote some years later, became his masterwork, the one book from which, as Ernest Hemingway noted, "all modern American literature comes."

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was written with the idea of lost boyhood. Twain used the first person narration. It is Mark Twain’s greatest achievement. It presents the world’s view of America and has a profound impact on the development of American writing. Twain's influences on American writers of the 20th century was his presentation of native American material, his art of the vernacular idiom, his departure from the tradition of the 19th century gentility, and his sense of alienation. This novel shows Twain's satire on southern culture before the Civil War, around 1850, when the Mississippi Valley was still being settled. Twain condemned racial discrimination. It also shows his satire on the poor whites, their ludicrous idea—they were white and they were better than black slaves, and that his satire on the genteel upper-class southerners—a very aristocratic life and being violent accepting their violence as right. The novel uses vernacular language, unpretentious, colloquial, and poetic style and the directness of the language. Twain depicted social life through descriptions of local places and people he knew best.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the major achievements of his art—the carefully controlled point of view, with its implicit ironies expressed through the voice of a semiliterate boy; the masterful use of dialects; the felicitous balancing of nostalgic romanticism and realism, humor and pathos, innocence and evil. This novel shows his ability to capture the enduring, archetypal, mythic images of America and to create the most memorable characters in all of American fiction.