Biography of mark twain ppta

Realistic literature is an. Anticipation Questions for Journal Agree or Disagree? Running away is a solution to a problem. People of different races can get along with each. Huck Finn Background Information. Mark Twain: Who was he? Racism and Book Banning. When The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first published in , it was declared an instant literary classic by respected.

Twain called Huckleberry Finn. Use Biographical Approach to Analyze Literature. Anticipatory Set The past and current life of an author is reflected in their books. Zachary Senchak Pd. His father was an attorney and judge who died of pneumonia in , when Twain was only Louis , and Cincinnati , joining the newly formed International Typographical Union , the printers' trade union.

Twain educated himself in public libraries in the evenings, finding wider information than at a conventional school. Twain describes his boyhood in Life on the Mississippi , stating that "there was but one permanent ambition" among his comrades: to be a steamboatman. The pilot, even in those days of trivial wages, had a princely salary — from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and no board to pay.

The pilot had to "get up a warm personal acquaintanceship with every old snag and one-limbed cottonwood and every obscure wood pile that ornaments the banks of this river for twelve hundred miles; and more than that, must Steamboat pilot Horace E. Bixby took Twain on as a cub pilot to teach him the river between New Orleans and St. Twain studied the Mississippi, learning its landmarks, how to navigate its currents effectively, and how to read the river and its constantly shifting channels, reefs, submerged snags, and rocks that would "tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated".

Piloting also gave Twain his pen name from " mark twain ", the leadsman's cry for a measured river depth of two fathoms 12 feet , which was safe water for a steamboat. As a young pilot, Clemens served on the steamer A. Chambers with Grant Marsh , who became famous for his exploits as a steamboat captain on the Missouri River. The two liked and admired each other, and maintained a correspondence for many years after Clemens left the river.

While training, Samuel convinced his younger brother Henry to work with him, and even arranged a post of mud clerk for him on the steamboat Pennsylvania. On June 13, , the steamboat's boiler exploded; Henry succumbed to his wounds eight days later. Twain continued to work on the river and was a river pilot until the Civil War broke out in , when traffic was curtailed along the Mississippi River.

At the start of hostilities, he enlisted briefly in a local Confederate unit, the Marion Rangers as a Second Lieutenant. Twain describes the episode in his book Roughing It. Orion became secretary to Nevada Territory governor James W. Nye in , and Twain joined him when he moved west. The brothers traveled more than two weeks on a stagecoach across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains , visiting the Mormon community in Salt Lake City.

Twain's journey ended in the silver-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada , where he became a miner on the Comstock Lode. Twain first used his pen name here on February 3, , when he wrote a humorous travel account titled "Letter From Carson — re: Joe Goodman; party at Gov. Johnson's; music" and signed it "Mark Twain". Twain's experiences in the American West inspired Roughing It , written during —71 and published in Twain's first success as a writer came when his humorous tall tale "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was published on November 18, , in the New York weekly The Saturday Press , bringing him national attention.

His letters to the Union were popular and became the basis for his first lectures. He wrote a collection of travel letters which were later compiled as The Innocents Abroad It was on this trip that Twain met fellow passenger Charles Langdon, who showed him a picture of his sister Olivia. Twain later claimed to have fallen in love at first sight.

Upon returning to the United States, Twain was offered honorary membership in Yale University 's secret society Scroll and Key in Twain and Olivia Langdon corresponded throughout She rejected his first marriage proposal, but Twain continued to court her and managed to overcome her father's initial reluctance. The Clemenses lived in Buffalo, New York , from to Twain owned a stake in the Buffalo Express newspaper and worked as an editor and writer.

They had three daughters: Susy — , Clara — , [ 54 ] and Jean — The Clemenses formed a friendship with David Gray, who worked as an editor of the rival Buffalo Courier , and his wife Martha. Twain later wrote that the Grays were " 'all the solace' he and Livy had during their 'sorrowful and pathetic brief sojourn in Buffalo ' ", and that Gray's "delicate gift for poetry" was wasted working for a newspaper.

Starting in , Twain moved his family to Hartford, Connecticut , where he arranged the building of a home next door to Stowe. Twain wrote many of his classic novels during his 17 years in Hartford — and over 20 summers at Quarry Farm. The couple's marriage lasted 34 years until Olivia's death in Twain was fascinated with science and scientific inquiry.

He developed a close and lasting friendship with Nikola Tesla , and the two spent much time together in Tesla's laboratory. Twain was an early proponent of fingerprinting as a forensic technique, featuring it in a tall tale in Life on the Mississippi and as a central plot element in the novel Pudd'nhead Wilson This type of historical manipulation became a trope of speculative fiction as alternate histories.

Part of the footage was used in The Prince and the Pauper , a two-reel short film. It is the only known existing film footage of Twain. Twain made a substantial amount of money through his writing, but he lost a great deal through investments. Twain invested mostly in new inventions and technology, particularly the Paige typesetting machine.

It was considered a mechanical marvel that amazed viewers when it worked, but it was prone to breakdowns. He lost the bulk of his book profits, as well as a substantial portion of his wife's inheritance. Twain also lost money through his publishing house, Charles L. Webster and Company , which enjoyed initial success selling the memoirs of Ulysses S.

Fewer than copies were sold. Twain and his family closed down their expensive Hartford home in response to the dwindling income and moved to Europe in June William M. Twain, Olivia, and their daughter Susy were all faced with health problems, and they believed that it would be of benefit to visit European baths. During that period, Twain returned to New York four times due to his enduring business troubles.

Twain's writings and lectures enabled him to recover financially, combined with the help of his friend Henry Huttleston Rogers. Rogers first made Twain file for bankruptcy in April , then had him transfer the copyrights on his written works to his wife to prevent creditors from gaining possession of them. Finally, Rogers took absolute charge of Twain's money until all his creditors were paid.

Twain accepted an offer from Robert Sparrow Smythe [ 76 ] and embarked on a year-long around-the-world lecture tour in July [ 77 ] to pay off his creditors in full, although Twain was no longer under any legal obligation to do so. The first part of the itinerary took Twain across northern America to British Columbia , Canada, until the second half of August.

For the second part, he sailed across the Pacific Ocean. Twain's scheduled lecture in Honolulu , Hawaii, had to be canceled due to a cholera epidemic. His three months in India became the centerpiece of his page book Following the Equator. In the second half of July , Twain sailed back to England, completing his circumnavigation of the world begun 14 months before.

Twain and his family spent four more years in Europe, mainly in England and Austria October to May , with longer spells in London and Vienna. Clara had wished to study the piano under Theodor Leschetizky in Vienna. Jonas Henrik Kellgren, a Swedish osteopathic practitioner in Belgravia. They were persuaded to spend the summer at Kellgren's sanatorium by the lake in the Swedish village of Sanna.

Coming back in fall, they continued the treatment in London, until Twain was convinced by lengthy inquiries in America that similar osteopathic expertise was available there. Twain wrote that he had "never seen any place that was so satisfactorily situated, with its noble trees and stretch of country, and everything that went to make life delightful, and all within a biscuit's throw of the metropolis of the world.

Twain was in great demand as a featured speaker, performing solo humorous talks similar to modern stand-up comedy. In the late s, Twain spoke to the Savage Club in London and was elected an honorary member. He was told that only three men had been so honored, including the Prince of Wales , and Twain replied: "Well, it must make the Prince feel mighty fine.

In , Twain was honored at a banquet in Montreal , Canada where he made reference to securing a copyright. The reason for the Toronto visits was to secure Canadian and British copyrights for Twain's upcoming book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , [ 90 ] [ 92 ] to which he had alluded in his Montreal visit. The reason for the Ottawa visit had been to secure Canadian and British copyrights for Life on the Mississippi.

In his later years, Twain lived at 14 West 10th Street in Manhattan. Olivia's death in and Jean's on December 24, , deepened Twain's gloom. In April , Twain heard that his friend Ina Coolbrith had lost nearly all that she owned in the San Francisco earthquake , and he volunteered a few autographed portrait photographs to be sold for her benefit.

Twain was resistant initially, but he eventually admitted that four of the resulting images were the finest ones ever taken of him. In , Twain formed the Angel Fish and Aquarium Club, for girls whom he viewed as surrogate granddaughters. Its dozen or so members ranged in age from 10 to Twain exchanged letters with his "Angel Fish" girls and invited them to concerts and the theatre and to play games.

Twain wrote in that the club was his "life's chief delight". Twain was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters D. Oxford University awarded him a Doctorate of Law in Twain was born two weeks after Halley's Comet 's closest approach in ; he said in [ 74 ]. I came in with Halley's Comet in It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it.

It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: "Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together". Twain's prediction was eerily accurate; he died of a heart attack on April 21, , in Stormfield , one month before the comet passed Earth that year.

Mark Twain gave pleasure — real intellectual enjoyment — to millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasure to millions yet to come His humor was American, but he was nearly as much appreciated by Englishmen and people of other countries as by his own countrymen. He has made an enduring part of American literature. The Langdon family plot is marked by a foot monument two fathoms, or "mark twain" placed there by Twain's surviving daughter Clara.

He expressed a preference for cremation for example, in Life on the Mississippi , but he acknowledged that his surviving family would have the last word. Twain began his career writing light, humorous verse, but he became a chronicler of the vanities, hypocrisies, and murderous acts of mankind. At mid-career, Twain combined rich humor, sturdy narrative, and social criticism in Huckleberry Finn.

He was a master of rendering colloquial speech and helped to create and popularize a distinctive American literature built on American themes and language. Many of Twain's works have been suppressed at times for various reasons. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been repeatedly restricted in American high schools, not least for its frequent use of the word " nigger ", [ ] a slur commonly used for Black people in the nineteenth century.

A complete bibliography of Twain's works is nearly impossible to compile because of the vast number of pieces he wrote often in obscure newspapers and his use of several different pen names. Additionally, a large portion of Twain's speeches and lectures have been lost or were not recorded; thus, the compilation of his works is an ongoing process.

Researchers have rediscovered published material as recently as and Twain was writing for the Virginia City newspaper the Territorial Enterprise in when he met lawyer Tom Fitch , editor of the competing newspaper Virginia Daily Union and known as the "silver-tongued orator of the Pacific". Clemens, your lecture was magnificent. It was eloquent, moving, sincere.

Never in my entire life have I listened to such a magnificent piece of descriptive narration. But you committed one unpardonable sin — the unpardonable sin. It is a sin you must never commit again. You closed a most eloquent description, by which you had keyed your audience up to a pitch of the intensest interest, with a piece of atrocious anti-climax which nullified all the really fine effect you had produced.

It was in these days that Twain became a writer of the Sagebrush School ; he was known later as its most famous member. After a burst of popularity, the Sacramento Union commissioned him to write letters about his travel experiences. The first journey that Twain took for this job was to ride the steamer Ajax on its maiden voyage to the Sandwich Islands Hawaii.

All the while, he was writing letters to the newspaper that were meant for publishing, chronicling his experiences with humor. These letters proved to be the genesis to Twain's 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.

In , he published his second piece of travel literature, Roughing It , as an account of his journey from Missouri to Nevada, his subsequent life in the American West , and his visit to Hawaii. The book lampoons American and Western society in the same way that Innocents critiqued the various countries of Europe and the Middle East. The book, written with Twain's neighbor Charles Dudley Warner , is also his only collaboration.

Twain's next work drew on his experiences on the Mississippi River. Old Times on the Mississippi was a series of sketches published in the Atlantic Monthly in featuring his disillusionment with Romanticism. Twain's next major publication was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer , which draws on his youth in Hannibal. The Prince and the Pauper was not as well received, despite a storyline that is common in film and literature today.

The book tells the story of two boys born on the same day who are physically identical, acting as a social commentary as the prince and pauper switch places. Twain had started Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which he consistently had problems completing [ ] and had completed his travel book A Tramp Abroad , which describes his travels through central and southern Europe.

Twain's next major published work was the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , which confirmed him as a noteworthy American writer. Some have called it the first Great American Novel, and the book has become required reading in many schools throughout the United States. Huckleberry Finn was an offshoot from Tom Sawyer and had a more serious tone than its predecessor.

Four hundred manuscript pages were written in mid, right after the publication of Tom Sawyer. The last fifth of Huckleberry Finn is subject to much controversy. Some say that Twain experienced a "failure of nerve," as critic Leo Marx puts it. 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 novel. In it, he also explains that "Mark Twain" was the call made when the boat was in safe water, indicating a depth of two or twain fathoms 12 feet or 3. Twain produced President Ulysses S.

Grant 's Memoirs through his fledgling publishing house, Charles L. Webster and Company , which he co-owned with Charles L. Webster , his nephew by marriage. A Connecticut Yankee shows the absurdities of political and social norms by setting them in the court of King Arthur. The book was started in December , then shelved a few months later until the summer of , and eventually finished in the spring of Twain's next large-scale work was Pudd'nhead Wilson , which he wrote rapidly, as he was desperately trying to stave off bankruptcy.

From November 12 to December 14, , Twain wrote 60, words for the novel. This novel also contains the tale of two boys born on the same day who switch positions in life, like The Prince and the Pauper. It was first published serially in Century Magazine , and when it was finally published in book form, Pudd'nhead Wilson appeared as the main title; however, the "subtitles" make the entire title read The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Comedy of The Extraordinary Twins.

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 said a year before his death that this was the work that he was most proud of, despite the criticism that he received for it, writing: " I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well.

And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none. Twain specifically insisted it to be an anonymous publication so that readers would take it as a serious historical account. To pay the bills and keep his business projects afloat, Twain had begun to write articles and commentary furiously, with diminishing returns, but it was not enough.

He filed for bankruptcy in During this time of dire financial straits, Twain published several literary reviews in newspapers to help make ends meet. Twain became an extremely outspoken critic of other authors and other critics; he suggested that, before praising Cooper's work, Thomas Lounsbury , Brander Matthews , and Wilkie Collins "ought to have read some of it".

George Eliot , Jane Austen , and Robert Louis Stevenson also fell under Twain's attack during this time period, beginning around and continuing until his death. Twain places emphasis on concision, utility of word choice, and realism; he complains, for example, that Cooper's Deerslayer purports to be realistic but has several shortcomings.

Ironically, several of Twain's own works were later criticized for lack of continuity Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and organization Pudd'nhead Wilson. Twain's wife died in while the couple were staying at the Villa di Quarto in Florence. After some time had passed, he published some works that his wife, his de facto editor and censor throughout her married life, had looked down upon.

The Mysterious Stranger is perhaps the best known, depicting various visits of Satan to earth. This particular work was not published in Twain's lifetime. His manuscripts included three versions, written between and the so-called Hannibal, Eseldorf, and Print Shop versions. The resulting confusion led to extensive publication of a jumbled version, and only recently [ when?

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-chronological order. Some archivists and compilers have rearranged the biography into a more conventional form, thereby eliminating some of Twain's humor and the flow of the book. The first volume of the autobiography, over pages, was published by the University of California in November , years after his death, as Twain wished.

Twain's works have been subjected to censorship efforts. According to Stuart , "Leading these banning campaigns, generally, were religious organizations or individuals in positions of influence — not so much working librarians, who had been instilled with that American "library spirit" which honored intellectual freedom within bounds of course ".

For two decades, Twain lived in a house in Hartford, Connecticut — , and the American Publishing Company in that city published the first edition of several of his books. Webster and Company. Twain's views became more radical as he grew older. In a letter to friend and fellow writer William Dean Howells in , Twain acknowledged that his views had changed and developed over his lifetime, referring to one of his favorite works:.

When I finished Carlyle 's French Revolution in , I was a Girondin ; every time I have read it since, I have read it differently — being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and environment And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat. Twain was a staunch supporter of technological progress and commerce. He was against welfare measures, because Twain believed that society in the " business age " is governed by "exact and constant" laws that should not be "interfered with for the accommodation of any individual or political or religious faction".

By present standards Mark Twain was more conservative than liberal. He believed strongly in laissez faire, thought personal political rights secondary to property rights, admired self-made plutocrats, and advocated a leadership to be composed of men of wealth and brains. Among his attitudes now more readily recognized as liberal were a faith in progress through technology and a hostility towards monarchy, inherited aristocracy, the Roman Catholic church, and, in his later years, imperialism.

Twain wrote glowingly about unions in the river boating industry in Life on the Mississippi , which was read in union halls decades later. Who are the oppressors? The few: the King, the capitalist, and a handful of other overseers and superintendents. Who are the oppressed? The many: the nations of the earth; the valuable personages; the workers; they that make the bread that the soft-handed and idle eat.

Twain further wrote "Why is it right that there is not a fairer division of the spoil all around? Because laws and constitutions have ordered otherwise. Then it follows that laws and constitutions should change around and say there shall be a more nearly equal division. Before , Twain was largely in favor of imperialism. In the late s and early s, he spoke out strongly in favor of American interests in the Hawaiian Islands.

In the New York Herald , October 16, , Twain describes his transformation and political awakening, in the context of the Philippine—American War , to anti-imperialism :. I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries.

We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world.

Biography of mark twain ppta

It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves. But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris which ended the Spanish—American War , and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way.

And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land. During the Boxer Rebellion , Twain said that "the Boxer is a patriot. He loves his country better than he does the countries of other people. I wish him success. From , soon after his return from Europe, until his death in , Twain was vice-president of the American Anti-Imperialist League , [ ] which opposed the annexation of the Philippines by the United States and had "tens of thousands of members".

The Incident in the Philippines , posthumously published in , was in response to the Moro Crater Massacre , in which Moros were killed. Twain wrote: "In what way was it a battle? It has no resemblance to a battle We cleaned up our four days' work and made it complete by butchering these helpless people. Twain was critical of imperialism in other countries as well.

In Following the Equator , Twain expresses "hatred and condemnation of imperialism of all stripes". Reports of outrageous exploitation and grotesque abuses led to widespread international outcry in the early s, arguably the first large-scale human rights movement. In the soliloquy, the King argues that bringing Christianity to the colony outweighs "a little starvation".

The abuses against Congolese forced laborers continued until the movement forced the Belgian government to take direct control of the colony. During the Philippine—American War , Twain wrote a short pacifist story titled The War Prayer , which makes the point that humanism and Christianity's preaching of love are incompatible with the conduct of war.

It was submitted to Harper's Bazaar for publication, but on March 22, , the magazine rejected the story as "not quite suited to a woman's magazine ". Eight days later, Twain wrote to his friend Daniel Carter Beard , to whom he had read the story, "I don't think the prayer will be published in my time. None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth.

Twain acknowledged that he had originally sympathized with the more moderate Girondins of the French Revolution and then shifted his sympathies to the more radical Sansculottes , indeed identifying himself as "a Marat " and writing that the Reign of Terror paled in comparison to the older terrors that preceded it. I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle.

I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute. Twain was an adamant supporter of the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of slaves, even going so far as to say, " Lincoln 's Proclamation Twain was also a supporter of women's suffrage , as evidenced by his " Votes for Women " speech, given in Helen Keller benefited from Twain's support as she pursued her college education and publishing despite her disabilities and financial limitations.

The two were friends for roughly 16 years. Through Twain's efforts, the Connecticut legislature voted a pension for Prudence Crandall , since Connecticut's official heroine, for her efforts towards the education of young African-American women in Connecticut. Sam kept up his schooling until he was about 12 years old, when — with his father dead and the family needing a source of income — he found employment as an apprentice printer at the Hannibal Courier , which paid him with a meager ration of food.

In , at 15, he got a job as a printer and occasional writer and editor at the Hannibal Western Union , a little newspaper owned by his brother, Orion. Then, in , year-old Twain fulfilled a dream: He began learning the art of piloting a steamboat on the Mississippi. A licensed steamboat pilot by , he soon found regular employment plying the shoals and channels of the great river.

Twain loved his career — it was exciting, well-paying and high-status, roughly akin to flying a jetliner today. However, his service was cut short in by the outbreak of the Civil War , which halted most civilian traffic on the river. As the Civil War began, the people of Missouri angrily split between support for the Union and the Confederate States.

Twain opted for the latter, joining the Confederate Army in June but serving for only a couple of weeks until his volunteer unit disbanded. Where, he wondered then, would he find his future? What venue would bring him both excitement and cash? His answer: the great American West. In July , Twain climbed on board a stagecoach and headed for Nevada and California, where he would live for the next five years.

At first, he prospected for silver and gold, convinced that he would become the savior of his struggling family and the sharpest-dressed man in Virginia City and San Francisco. But nothing panned out, and by the middle of , he was flat broke and in need of a regular job. Twain knew his way around a newspaper office, so that September, he went to work as a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.

He churned out news stories, editorials and sketches, and along the way adopted the pen name Mark Twain — steamboat slang for 12 feet of water. Twain became one of the best-known storytellers in the West. He honed a distinctive narrative style — friendly, funny, irreverent, often satirical and always eager to deflate the pretentious. He got a big break in , when one of his tales about life in a mining camp, "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," was printed in newspapers and magazines around the country the story later appeared under various titles.

His next step up the ladder of success came in , when he took a five-month sea cruise in the Mediterranean, writing humorously about the sights for American newspapers with an eye toward getting a book out of the trip. In , The Innocents Abroad was published, and it became a nationwide bestseller. At 34, this handsome, red-haired, affable, canny, egocentric and ambitious journalist and traveler had become one of the most popular and famous writers in America.

However, Twain worried about being a Westerner. In those years, the country's cultural life was dictated by an Eastern establishment centered in New York City and Boston — a straight-laced, Victorian , moneyed group that cowed Twain. Twain's fervent wish was to get rich, support his mother, rise socially and receive what he called "the respectful regard of a high Eastern civilization.

In February , he improved his social status by marrying year-old Olivia Livy Langdon, the daughter of a rich New York coal merchant. Writing to a friend shortly after his wedding, Twain could not believe his good luck: "I have Livy, like many people during that time, took pride in her pious, high-minded, genteel approach to life. Twain hoped that she would "reform" him, a mere humorist, from his rustic ways.

The couple settled in Buffalo and later had four children. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in , and soon thereafter he began writing a sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Writing this work, commented biographer Everett Emerson, freed Twain temporarily from the "inhibitions of the culture he had chosen to embrace.