Essay on The Importance of Mark Twain in American Literature

What if I told you Mark Twain was not a real person and he never wrote the novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?” Samuel Clemons was his real name and Mark Twain was just his pen name. Clemons was cursed with death starting early in life. When he was young many of his relatives died and was not properly educated. As an adult, Clemons was able to write many famous novels and some lesser-known poems. He raised a family of his own, but would also suffer from financial problems. When he passed, many of his family went with him. He is still remembered today as one of the best writers of his generation. He wrote a poem, that he named To Jennie that was very true to the time it was written. Samuel Clemons had a full life, stood his ground against all of his challenges, and had many memorable experiences.

Samuel L. Clemens, known as Mark Twain, was born on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri. He was the sixth child of John and Jane Clemens, his father was a storekeeper and his mother was a stay at home mom. After his father?s death in 1847 the family went into an economic struggle, which shaped his writing style. He lived in Hannibal till he was 17 which sparked his writing career and fueled his ideas with things that he experienced as a kid like he saw a man murder a cattle rancher and watched a slave get killed by a blacksmith. Then when he was older he moved out west to Nevada and California where he shared multiple of his tales such as ?Jim Smiley and

The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a rising star that preserved a special place in the world of the American literature. Sam Langhorne Clemens who is better known by his pen name Mark Twain is considered an important figure for millions of readers and his works are highly appreciated. Being born in the agricultural south in Florida and growing up in Hannibal Missouri had a huge influence on his life and literary career. An interesting fact about him is that he left school at the age of eleven after the death of his father. Due to his need for financial support, he worked as a helper in the office of his brother Orien’s newspaper, The Western Union.

Mark Twain is a fictitious name of Samuel Clemens. Mark Twain was an American journalist, humorist, novelist, and lecturer. He acquired global fame because of his travel narratives, such as The Innocents Abroad of the year 1869, Roughing It of the year 1872, and Life on the Mississippi of 1883. He is also famous for his boyhood adventure stories, particularly The Adventures of Tom Sawyer of the year 1876 and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn of 1885. He was known to be a distinctive humorist, and irascible moralist, and a gifted raconteur. Before independence, America was marked by cultural and religious differences among small colonies, making a single nation from these diverse populations

     "Mark Twain, which is a pseudonym for Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was born in 1835, and died in 1910. He was an american writer and humorist. Maybe one of the reasons Twain will be remembered is because his writings contained morals and positive views. Because Twain's writing is so descriptive, people look to his books for realistic interpretations of places, for his memorable characters, and his ability to describe his hatred for hypocrisy and oppression. HE believed he could write. Most authors relied on other people and what they said, but because Twain was so solitary, he made himself so successful. 1"

Thus, Twain’s early experiences in life helped him to flesh out a well-rounded vocabulary and sparked his interests in adventure and traveling. Twain spent his boyhood in the riverside town of Hannibal, Missouri where he, “experienced the excitement of the colorful steamboats that docked at the town wharf, bringing comedians, singers, gamblers, swindlers, slave dealers, and assorted other river travelers” (Gribben). His exposure to much of the world at a young age opened his eyes to people groups, travel, and differences in dialect that would all become subject matter of his later writing. Twain wrote in Life on the Mississippi that he became acquainted with all the “different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history” while he worked as a steamboat apprentice (128). The diverse people and places he met during his time on the river all became awe-inspiring to him and served as the foundation for his works to come. Countless

Twain recounted his war experiences for an audience in October of 1877 at a dinner for the Boston Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company. He spoke before the dinner recounting his actual Civil War experience.  Twain said, “I was made Second Lieutenant and Chief Mogul of a company of eleven men, who knew nothing about-war - nor anything, for we had no Captain. My friend, who was 19 years old…and just out of the infant school, was made Orderly Sergeant. His name was Ben Tupper. He had a hard time.” Important from his statement is the confirmation that Twain actually held the exact position of the narrator of his story and also the consistent youth and inexperience of the troops. The theme of inexperience is continued in his story many times over. An example of which can be seen when the narrator describes the daily activities of the men, “afternoons, we rode off here and there in squads a few miles and visited the farmer’s girls and had a youthful good time…” These are not the action of hardened killers. Rather, they are those of innocent and ignorant boys that have the misinterpretation that they are fighting a war. This very innocence could be that which Twain shared with his “narrator” at an actual time in history when he too was playing war with the Marion Rangers.

Mark Twain, one of the most famous and influential American writers, was born in Hannibal, Missouri on November 30, 1835 and died April 21, 1910. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, he eventually adopted his famous pseudonym in 1863. Shortly after his father's death in 1847, when Clemens was twelve, his father passed away. After his father death, he applied for an apprenticeship at the local-printing shop. While working in the printing shop, Twain learned the skills required to be a printer and developed an aptitude for witty short essays and responses. Mark Twain was enthralled by his opportunity to develop his skills as a printer, and later he realized that he had a unique talent for writing. By working as an apprentice printer, he

Samuel L. Clemens, better known for his novelist title Mark Twain, wrote an intuitive short story in 1905 as a response to the Spanish-American and Philippine-American War. He began his writing career at the age of eighteen until the commence of the Civil War; in which he then volunteered to join the war. Within two weeks he quit and set off for a new conquest much in which resembled soul searching. Expediting to move across the country he crossed paths with natives and became a familiar writer moving to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). Twain’s form of writing cultivated into a fervent style during his life in Hartford yet took an aberrant turn reaching the nineteen hundred. He began to pivot around dark writings that focused on the inner workings

Samuel Agnew was a priest in Tippah County, Mississippi. His family were avid supporters of the Confederate cause, running and hiding at the alarm of Yankee invasion. Sam was exempted from the war because he was a minister, although accosted he was a few times under the presumption that he was avoiding the draft. He had heard of the devastation that the confederate soldiers had endured, and kept a keen interest in news about the war, and the policies that the Confederacy was putting in his free time. He tried to cultivate opium and tobacco, as a hobby and to sell to make money to use to buy

Mark Twain, unlike any other famous novelist/writer, has his very own accomplishments. The two of his greatest accomplishments is what everyone knows him famous for. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as being his greatest and most popular works were also to quickly become his greatest accomplishments. Likewise, both books corresponded with the other about adventures of both low class, Huck Finn, and middle class, Tom Sawyer, had together and of their friendship. Another believed greatest accomplishment was his hidden eulogy that hadn’t

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. He is better known by his pen name “Mark Twain”, which is a nautical term which means two fathoms deep. As a child he learned to smoke and led a gang, leaving school at age 12 to become an apprentice at a printing shop. He became a free lance journalist and traveled around country until age 24, when he became a river boat pilot on the Mississippi, his childhood dream. During the Civil War, Twain joined the Confederate Army, but left and went west in search of gold. When that failed him, he became a reporter and comedian. His book The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in 1885. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is narrated from Huck’s perspective,

Twain, Mark, pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), American writer and humorist, whose best work is characterized by broad, often irreverent humor or biting social satire. Twain's writing is also known for realism of place and language, memorable characters, and hatred of hypocrisy and oppression.

Twain looked for a job, knowing his way around a news station he went for a reporter's job. He landed a job at Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. He began to shoot out multiple stories, and adopting the pen name of "Mark

Twain wrote a book called Innocents Abroad and “in the first year it was published it sold 75,000 copies. Then, probably because of a nationwide depression that began in 1873, sales plummeted, reaching only around 7,800 copies in 1873, and 5,100 copies in 1874” (133). Ernest Hemingway stated “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn”(149). Twain still today is still famous for not only the novels he wrote but also many famous quotes that he has said.