Mark Twain Essay

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Recommended: The influence of mark twain

Colton Tribby
Mrs. Randall
Honors English 9B-4
4 April 2014
Behind The Pen Name: Mark Twain
Twain, a humorist, moralist, entertainer, philosopher, and writer, invented a new perspective of fiction by writing stories such as, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Twain was considered “The Lincoln of Literature” (Williams 1). He wasn’t always the beloved writer he is today, he was considered a rebel, and spoke against the police. Twain’s career didn’t take off until he moved to Hannibal, Missouri. It was there he wrote some of his best works. Twain followed his own conscience instead of society’s view of right and wrong.
Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835. It wasn’t until 1853 that he became Mark Twain. Twain's literary experience began when he became a printers apprentice at the age of seventeen. It was after that, that Twain moved away from Hannibal, Missouri to try several jobs. "It was not until he was 37”, he once remarked, “that he woke up to discover he had become a literary person”. (Augustyn 28) While working as a riverboat pilot, Twain, at the time called Clemens, heard the term "Mark Twain" which indicated a safe water depth to operate a riverboat. Clemens chose this term as his pen name. Twain first used his pen name while writing for the newspaper The Enterprise. After working as a riverboat pilot, Twain served as a Confederate soldier for two weeks before moving out west.
During this time Twains reputation was not very good. Twain often got in fights, and spoke out against the police. After a man he knew was arrested after a fight, Twain left the city for the Toulumne foothills for mining. There he found his inspiration for his next story when he heard the tale of The Jumping...

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...disease, Twain left specific instructions for the releases of some of his writings. He worked on his autobiography up until a few months before his death, and was not published by the University of California Press in until 2006. Some of his collections of speeches and essays were also not published until 2001. Twain felt that some of his works were so controversial, he requested them not to be published until the year 2406.
Mark Twain has created some of the most persistent pictures of the sense of place and character that readers identify as American. Twains works are now considered classics. William Dean Howells said " Lincoln and Clemens were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature." (Williams 18). Twains perspective will never be forgotten. His place in American literary culture is safe.

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