Samuel Langhorne Clemens- A life Worth Remembering

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Recommended: The importance of Mark Twain in the literary world

What is the value of a life? Every man, whether he be a prince or a pauper, smart or dumb, ponders the question of his own worth at least once in his short, pathetic life. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was no different and had quickly become engrossed with this very question. Even the greatest humorist in the history of American literature turned very bitter and cynical about life, due to tragic events late in his life. Thankfully, much of Mark Twain’s greatest works, including The Prince and the Pauper, were written earlier in his life, when he did not have manifold and incessant adversities polluting his usual humor and satire. It is this great work that we use today to measure the worth of Mark Twain and his fascinating life. Mark Twain was inspired to write The Prince and the Pauper and his other great works by his childhood in the town of Hannibal, Missouri, his career as a Mississippi River steamboat pilot, and his adventures across rural America during the Civil War period.
To begin any discussion about a great life, it is most important to start from the beginning, childhood. Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri. When he was four years old, the Clemens family, consisting of six children, moved to Hannibal, Missouri, where Clemens spent most of his childhood. The small, dusty, farming town is where Clemens was inspired to write some of his most famous stories, including Huckleberry Finn ("The Prince" 173). It is also where he developed an appreciation for the vernacular and a distaste for the haughty, esoteric language of European literature. Clemens longed for an "idealized past as a haven from the increasingly hostile present," a common theme in both his lif...

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...eamboat pilot, and from his adventures in Civil War era America. It was the culmination of these three periods of his life, as well as various other events, that inspired Clemens to write his magnificent pieces of literature and define the American style of prose for generations to come. The life experiences that he would intwine throughout his works made his stye unique and revolutionary. Based upon the available evidence, it is clear that Samuel Langhorne Clemens was a priceless life.

Works Cited

"Mark Twain." Short Story Criticism. Ed. Thomas Votteler. Vol. 6. Detroit: Gale Research, 1990. 291-293. Print.
"Mark Twain." Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Sharon K. Hall. Vol. 6. Detroit: Gale Research, 1982. 452-453. Print.
“The Prince and the Pauper: Mark Twain.” Novels for Students. Ed. Sara Constantakis. Vol. 31. Detroit: Gale, 2010. 172-174. Print.

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