Mark Twain the first truly American writer - Реферат

“The reason is plain: a pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in earth.” Piloting taught Twain lessons in freedom that were to be immensely valuable to him later. But when the Civil War began, the riverboats ceased operation and, after a brief period serving with a group of Confederate volunteers, he traveled west. There, he spent the rest of the war prospecting for silver with his brother and then working with Bret Harte as a journalist in San Francisco. It was while working as a journalist in the West, in 1863, that he adopted the pseudonym Mark Twain. And in 1865 he made that name famous with the tall tale, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Brief though it is, the tale is notable not least because it reveals many of the vital ingredients in Twain’s art: the rough humor of the Southwest and Western frontier, a recognizable teller of the tale (in this case, a character called Simon Wheeler), above all, a creative use of the vernacular and the sense of a story springing out of an oral tradition, being told directly to us, its audience. Twain now began touring the lecture circuits. His lively personality and quotable remarks made him immensely popular. His lecture tours also reinforced his habit of writing in the vernacular, the American idiom: “I amend the dialect stuff,” he once said, “by talking and talking it till it sounds right.” His first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867), appeared just before he set sail on a trip to Europe and the Holy Land. This was followed by his account of that trip, in Innocents Abroad, his humorous depiction of his travels west in Roughing It, and a satirical portrait of boom times after the Civil War, The Gilded Age (1873), written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner. Twain first turned to the matter of Hannibal in a series of articles published in the Atlantic Monthly entitled “Old Times on the Mississippi.” Revised and expanded, with new material added (some of it, as Twain candidly admitted, “taken from books” by others, “tho’ credit given”), this became Life on the Mississippi eight years later. What is remarkable about the essays and the book is how Twain turns autobiography into history. In his account of his own personal development, the author distinguishes between the romantic dreamer he once was, before training as a pilot, who saw the Mississippi merely in terms of its “grace,” “beauty,” and “poetry,” and the sternly empirical realist he became after his training, when he could see the Mississippi in more pragmatic terms - as a tool, to be used and maneuvered. That same model, contrasting the romance of the past with the realism of afterwards, is then deployed to explain larger social change: with the South of the author’s childhood identified with romance and the South of his adult years, after the Civil War, associated with realism - enjoying a sense of “progress, energy, and prosperity” along with the rest of the nation. The key feature of this contrast, personal and social, between times before the war and times after, is its slippery, equivocal nature. The glamour of the past is dismissed at one moment and then recalled with elegiacregret the next, the pragmatism and progress of the present is welcomed sometimes and at others coolly regretted. No attempt is made to resolve this contradiction. And similar, if not precisely the same, confusions are at work in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), a book clearly based on the author’s childhood years in Hannibal, renamed St. Petersburg.