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Advanced English 《高级英语》 (第三版）第一册主编：张汉熙外语教学与研究出版社

Lesson 6Mark Twain—— Mirror of America by Noel Grove

Teaching Points • I. Background information • II.Procedures • III. Text analysis • IV. Questions for discussion

I. Background Information • 1. Mark Twain’s life • 2. Mark Twain and his humor • 3. Pen names • 4. His books • 5. Mark Twain’s quotes • 6. Mississippi River

1.Mark Twain’s life

Born: Samuel Langhorne ClemensNovember 30, 1835 Florida, Missouri, U.S. • Died: April 21, 1910 (aged 74), Redding, Connecticut, U.S. • Pen name: Mark Twain • Occupation: Writer, lecturer • Nationality: American • Genres: Fiction, historical fiction, children's literature, non-fiction, travel literature, satire, essay, philosophical literature, social commentary, literary criticism • Notable works: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Mark Twain headstone in Woodlawn Cemetery.

When Twain was four, his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a port town on the Mississippi River that served as the inspiration for the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At that time, Missouri was a slave state, and young Twain became familiar with the institution of slavery, a theme he would later explore in his writing.

In March 1847, when Twain was 11, his father died of pneumonia. The next year, he became a printer's apprentice. In 1851, he began working as a typesetter and contributor of articles and humorous sketches for the Hannibal Journal, a newspaper owned by his brother Orion. When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. He joined the union and educated himself in public libraries in the evenings, finding wider sources of information than he would have at a conventional school. At 22, Twain returned to Missouri.

On a voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi, the steamboat pilot, Horace E. Bixby, inspired Twain to pursue a career as a steamboat pilot. A steamboat pilot needed a vast knowledge of the ever-changing river to be able to stop at the hundreds of ports and wood-lots along the river banks. Twain meticulously studied 2,000 miles (3,200 km) of the Mississippi for more than two years before he received his steamboat pilot license in 1859.

Missouri was a slave state, considered by many to be part of the South, and was represented in both the Confederate and Federal governments during the Civil War. Years later, Twain wrote a sketch, "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed", which claimed he and his friends had been Confederate volunteers for two weeks before disbanding their company.

Twain joined his brother, Orion, who in 1861 had been appointed secretary to James W. Nye, the governor of Nevada Territory, and headed west. Twain and his brother traveled for more than two weeks on a stagecoach across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. These experiences inspired Roughing It, and provided material for The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. Twain's journey ended in the silver-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, where he became a miner.

Twain failed as a miner and found work at a Virginia City newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise. It was here that he first used his famous pen name. On February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous travel account "Letter From Carson – re: Joe Goodman; party at Gov. Johnson's; music" with "Mark Twain". • Twain moved to San Francisco, California in 1864, where he continued working as a journalist.

His first great success as a writer came when his humorous tall tale, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", was published in the New York Saturday Press on November 18, 1865. It was an immediate hit and brought him national attention. A year later, he traveled to the Sandwich Islands (present-day Hawaii) as a reporter for the Sacramento Union. His travelogues were popular and became the basis for his first lectures.

In 1867, a local newspaper funded a trip to the Mediterranean. During his tour of Europe and the Middle East, he wrote a popular collection of travel letters, which were later compiled as The Innocents Abroad in 1869. It was on this trip that he met his future brother-in-law.

Charles Langdon showed a picture of his sister, Olivia, to Twain; Twain claimed to have fallen in love at first sight. The two met in 1868, were engaged a year later, and married in February 1870 in Elmira, New York. • The couple lived in Buffalo, New York from 1869 to 1871. Their son Langdon died of diphtheria at 19 months.

In 1871, Twain moved his family to Hartford, Connecticut, where starting in 1873, he arranged the building of a home. While living there Olivia gave birth to three daughters: Susy (1872–1896), Clara (1874–1962) and Jean (1880–1909). The couple's marriage lasted 34 years, until Olivia's death in 1904.

During his seventeen years in Hartford (1874–1891), Twain wrote many of his best-known works: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). • Twain made a second tour of Europe, described in the 1880 book A Tramp Abroad.

2. Mark Twain and his humor • “Mark Twain” was the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Mark Twain was called “the father of modern American literature”. Before him there was only American dialect; after him there comes the American language He is recognized as the first truly American writer, the true father of American literature, comes from his one book – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ernest Hemingway wrote: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn…it’s the best book we’ve had”.

Upon hearing of Twain's death, President William Howard Taft said: "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."

Mark Twain started his writing career as a teller of tall tales. To a great extent, his popularity rested on his humor. Before Mark Twain, humor had been just a technique of writing, a “fragrance” or “flavor” for the comic effect of a book, imposing little significance on the meaning of a book. There gad been dozens of humorists flourishing in American literature before Mark Twain, Inheriting his forerunners’ humorous arts, Mark Twain became the synthesizer of American humor.

There are two features of Mark Twain’s humor. One is the language of his language. Twain’s vernacular characters become more than figures of fun took on major importance for future American writers both humorous and not. Another feature is his hoax. In his elaboration of the hoax, Twain made his most marked formal contribution.

However, the real humor is not only meant to the funny or comic, a real humorist is definitely not a literary clown, way or buffoon by making fun of some small in congruities of people. The real humor should be the understanding of human nature, forgiveness of its weakness and love for human life, and it should impose much significance on the meaning of the book by attacking some deeper and more serious implication which gives breath and solidity to the book.

Mark Twain knew quite well the function of humor and the task of a humorist: “humorists of the mere sort cannot survive.” What Mark Twain wanted to do with humor was to “preach and teach”, for “humor must not professedly preach, and it must not professedly teach, but it must do both if it would live forever.” Thus, Mark Twain makes it clear that his humor is the unity of form and content, artistic technique and the thematic meaning. Behind the comic effect of his humor is latent, his teaching and preaching.

What Mark Twain preaches and teaches is his strong moral sense as a humanitarian. As he once said of his humor: “the only right thing was to get in my serious meaning always, to treat my audience fairly, to let them really feel the underlying moral that gave body and essence to my jest.”

The nature: ethical suggestion within comic coating of humor. • With his ideas about the world changing, his humor becomes much bitter. • The former optimistic and confident American has become so furious.

3. Pen names • He maintained that his primary pen name came from his years working on Mississippi riverboats, where two fathoms, a depth indicating safe water for passage of boat, was measured on the sounding line. A fathom is a maritime unit of depth, equivalent to two yards (1.8 m); twain is an archaic term for "two". The riverboatman's cry was mark twain or, more fully, by the mark twain, meaning "according to the mark [on the line], [the depth is] two [fathoms]", that is, "there are 12 feet (3.7 m) of water under the boat and it is safe to pass".

4. His books: • The Innocents Abroad 1869Curious Republic of Gondour 1870A Burlesque Autobiography1871Roughing It 1872The Gilded Age 1873Sketches New and Old 1875The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 1876Carnival of Crime in CT 1877A Tramp Abroad 1880

1601 1880The Prince and the Pauper 1881The Stolen White Elephant 1882Life on the Mississippi 1883The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1885A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court 1889The American Claimant 1892Tom Sawyer Abroad 1894The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson 1894Tom Sawyer, Detective 1896Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Vol 1 1896

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Vol 2 1896 How to Tell a Story and Others 1897Following the Equator 1897The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg and other Stories 1900A Double Barrelled Detective 1902Extracts from Adam's Diary 1904A Dog's Tale 1904The $30,000 Bequest 1906What is Man? and Other Essays of Mark Twain 1906

Mark Twain's Speeches 1906Christian Science 1907A Horse's Tale 1907Is Shakespeare Dead? 1909Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven l909The Mysterious Stranger 1916 (uncompleted)

5. Mark Twain’s quotes: • A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain. • A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval. • An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear. • Do something every day that you don't want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain. • Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. • Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place.

6. Mississippi River

In the language of the Indians of the Great Lakes region, Mississippi means “great river”. • Because the Mississippi River flows north to south, it has always acted as an important waterway to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. Before the development of the steamboat most of the commerce was chiefly downstream to New Orleans

National Geographic • National Geographic Magazine, with a circulation of more than 10 million copies annually, is the third biggest only next to TV Guide and Reader's Digest (more than 16 million ). It is a monthly journal run by the National Geographic Society based in Washington DC, a non-profit scientific and educational organization

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