Mark Twain Research Paper

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Born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, Samuel L. Clemens wrote under the pen name Mark Twain. Mark Twain was an adventurer and wily intellectual. He wrote the classic American novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was also a riverboat pilot, journalist, lecturer, entrepreneur and inventor. Twain died on April 21, 1910, in Redding, Connecticut. Of all the nation’s writers he is still considered the greatest – it’s not merely literary distinction but something even bigger than that. From Theodore Roosevelt onwards, American presidents have routinely salted their oratory with down-home Twainisms. Writing grand tales about Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and the mighty Mississippi River, Mark Twain explored …show more content…

He honed a distinctive narrative style—friendly, funny, irreverent, often satirical and always eager to deflate the pretentious. He got a big break in 1865, when one of his tales about life in a mining camp, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” was printed in newspapers and magazines around the country. His next step up the ladder of success came in 1867, when he took a five-month sea cruise in the Mediterranean, writing humorously about the sights for American newspapers with an eye toward getting a book out of the trip. And so it came to pass that in 1869 The Innocents Abroad was published, and it became a bestseller. At 34, this red-haired, affable, canny, egocentric and ambitious journalist and traveler had become one of the most popular and famous writers in America. However, Mark Twain worried about being a Westerner. In those years, the country's cultural life was dictated by an Eastern establishment centered in New York and Boston—a straight-laced, Victorian, moneyed group that cowed Twain. Twain’s fervent wish was to get rich, support his mother, rise socially and receive what he called “the respectful regard of a high Eastern civilization.” In February 1870, he improved his social status by marrying 24-year-old Olivia (Livy) Langdon, the daughter of a rich New York coal merchant. The couple settled in Buffalo and later had four

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