The Best Passages of Mark Twain's Mostly Factual Autobiography - Research Paper Example

Lecturer: Topic Mark Twain, His Life and Inspiration to Write Samuel Langhoerne Clemens better known as Mark Twain was a descendant of the tiny hamlet of Florida, Missouri, born on November 30, 1835, his family having arrived from Tennessee six months earlier. Two years later the Clemens’s moved thirty five miles northeast to Hannibal, the Mississippi river town which is now celebrated for its famous son, who is now a renowned writer. The connections between the town and the writer are especially close as the author was to draw on his childhood experiences again and again in his most enduring works, in both fiction and in some of the best passages of his mostly factual autobiography, (Emerson, 2) He was just sixteen when he first described Hannibal in the Philadelphia American Courier “The town is situated on the Mississippi river, about one hundred and thirty miles above Saint Louis and has a population of around three thousand. Among the curiosities of this place we may mention the Cave, which is about three miles from the city, is of unknown length; it has innumerable messages, which are not unlike the streets of the city”. This cave , Hannibal’s steep hill, the steamboats (over a thousand arrived each year), the islands in the river, his uncle’s farm not far from Florida – Mark Twain would utilise all these in memorable scenes within the American literary landscape. According to Emerson (3), Mark Twain was very proud of his Virginian ancestry, and in his hospitalities and his rather formal stately manners he kept up its traditions in his way of living as a free thinker as his father Judge Clemens was a man of dignity with a good standing in the community, who died in 1847 leaving his family very young. He thus drew a stronger influence from his mother and much later assumed considerable responsibility for his mother’s financial wellbeing until her death in 1890. His mother made sure he went to school first in the Methodist Church and later at the Presbyterian Church which he joined and subsequently the writer recalls his Sunday school experiences when he wrote some of his works such as Tom Sawyer. He thus has a more affectionate description of his mother than his father and the characteristics he attributes are a bighearted woman hence Sam’s lifelong humanitarianism owed a debt to his mother. His younger schooling life was troublesome as he was plagued by illness during the first seven years of his life. His behaviour was almost eccentric, and he had a tendency to wander away from home and as a boy he read adventure stories of pirates and knights in the heroic fiction and poetry of such authors as Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron and James Fennimore Cooper. He thought of these writers as exemplary and he would not have become the highly original writer that in time he became. He was always a reader though he usually chose to present himself as far from being bookish. When his schooling came to close, he took a part time job that would later become his career. He served as a delivery boy and an office boy, became a printer’s apprentice for the hometown newspaper, the Hannibal Courier as he was following in the footstep of his brother Orion, nearly six years his elder, who has the same career in 1839. Two decades later, he wrote, “Education continued in the offices of the Hannibal ‘Courier’ & the ‘Journal,’ as an apprentice printer”. He served in all capabilities, including staff work as the Courier’s makeshift library introduced him to humorous publications such as The Spirit of the Times. He later found his concerns with victimisation and humiliation particularly congenial to his talents and attributes. For a short time, he adopted from the south frontier stories on the use of slang and elaborate misspellings. Like many of other writers associated with his school, he adopted a pen name. The successful publication of his work in the East made him turn his attention to local publication and was able to publish several items, some as a consequence of a disagreement with the editor of the Hannibal Tri-Weekly Messenger, whom he tried to embarrass. In May 1853, young Mark was awarded “our Assistant’s Column” and the column criticised newspapers that borrowed without credit. In mid-august, having been unable to find work in New York he took up a job as a typesetter and developed a literary technique he was to make good use of throughout his career. In the spring of 1854, he was obliged to leave the east because of what he latter termed as financial stress and then took his printing skills back to the Mississippi valley, sitting upright in the smoking car for two to three days and nights, as his interest in humour and in writing arose directly from his pleasure in books and in printer’s libraries and later his own substantial collection, he was an insatiable writer. A monument to Adam and A fable At first glance, a monument to Adam seem to be of interest to the whole human race, but reflection points out that most of its tumultuous generation of current and past times never heard of, claiming other ancestral beginnings. Not only all the swarming eastern races, but every scattered tribe of the world over not born into or adopting the sematic cosmologies that their own traditions making out that they are descended from this, that, or the other first man and clothing the genealogical tale each in its own pattern and embroidery and all different. It can be observed that both writings take a biblical approach as they emulate stories from the bible in the plot in making references to the advancement of human beings so far. There is a poetic perspective in A Fable whereas A Momentum to Adam takes a humorous approach in deriving the plot of the story. Mark Twain’s humorous proposal made a generation ago and taken was seriously by some of his enterprising fellow-townsmen. In the storyline A Momentum to Adam, the commercial class thought it might boom the modest western New York commune in which they, as he, then had residence, did not result in any visible monument to this striking figure. On the other hand it was imposing enough to deserve one even if wanting the stamp of universality which its avowed successors claim for it but it is far from clear that it would not have a good thing as least for Elmira where it was supposed to be put up. The distinguished humourist goes over the story anew in a recent number of Harper’s Weekly, setting forth how nearly his jocose fantasy came to being turned into a reality. There were some local bankers ready to put up the money and they discerned unlimited advertising possibilities in the enterprise, as to doing honour to Adam and rescuing his great claims from attack of small Darwinian monkeys, which idea never slinked in their heads, (Faulkner, 135) A significant approach to the analysis of the class that humans have divided themselves into comes out in descriptions of the labour force in A Fable. On the other hand, A Momentum to Adam shows the business class with enough money. They are well off enough to sponsor the monument and use it for other things such as advertisements. Credible as the enterprise might have been if carried out in a proper manner, decorating the genius of humour in all time, it is evident that these ingenerating devotees of commercialism were not the ones to give it impetus and direction. They would as likely as not have rented out advertising spaces on its pedestal, putting it on a par with the subway or the Inter-borough cars of the elevated stations and as the spectacle of their father of mankind or a big fraction of them holding advertisements of toilet soap and anti-billions pills and bruiting wide proclamation of the virtues of the rising sun stove polish would be one in which one of his descendants would like to see the old gentleman figuring. He is not unlike to be the subject of other attempts at commemoration, humorous and serious, but it might as well be settles first as last that he is not in any case to be made an advertising stalking horse or used aster the design of the fish-blooded Elmira’s of a generation ago to promote a local real estate boom. His monument must carry only his own illustrate ensigns, and these would lack verity if they did not signify that instead of being the admitted father of the whole human family he is only recognised by a comparatively modest fraction thereof. A Fable portrays a class of the labour community echoed in the post war period that is up against the government but on the other hand fell short of equating communism to labour as the writer’ work reinforces the stereotypes of the poor. Metaphor is used to refer broadly to any literature about work and the worker as opposed to more specific terms such as working-class literature, usually referring to writing for working-class consumption; proletarian literature, loosely identified with a specific genre of 1930s labour fiction; and worker writers, referring to workers who write literature. In this he is able to show the radical representations from the political perspective through fiction and metaphor. Works Cited Emerson, Everett . Mark Twain: A Literary Life. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Faulkner, William. A Fable. Starbooks Classics, 1978. Print. Read More