Mark Twain3

Mark Twain is important to American literature because of his novels and how they portray the American experience. Some of his best selling novels were Innocents Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In these books, Mark Twain recalls his own adventures of steamboating on the Mississippi River.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835 in a small village of Florida, Missouri. His parent’s names were John Marshall Clemens and Jan Lampton Clemens, descendants of slaves in Virginia. They had been married in Kentucky and move to Tennessee and then Missouri. When Sam was four, his father, who was full of the grandiose ideas of making a fortune, moved the family to Hannibal, Missouri. Here, the mighty Mississippi River with its mile side wide was the home of little Samuel Clemens. There on the West Bank of the river, Sam spent his boyhood with moving steamboats and making stops (Encyclopedia Americana 921A). Growing up aside a mile-wide surfaced Mississippi River was the same as Tom Sawyer did. Young Samuel must have watched, as any boy might, admire the strength of this river and the surrounding frontier. He seen men killed in waterfront brawls and Negroes that w

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Mark Twain A Writer’s Life Library of Congress Cataloging in

Publication Data, New York 1985. He might have remained a pilot had not the Civil War intruded (Encyclopedia Americana 192A). ere chained like animals transported up and down the river for slavery in the south. While in San Francisco Mark found a job with the Daily Morning Call. The story is told in the vivid view of Huck. Samuel pulled out this name from his piloting days on the Mississippi river (Meltzer 40).

Bibliography

BIBLIOGRAPHY

American Writers, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons 1974

Hart, James D. He hadn’t quite found out yet the power hidden within as a journalist and a writer. Shillaber’s Carpet Bag, which was a New York periodical. Connecticut: Grolier Incorporated, 1988 ed. “When readers saw that name they looked for a unique perspective upon people and events, and usually a comic one. To many readers this book remains third best behind Life on the Mississippi and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Since Samuel’s career as a prospector and a minor was a failure, he went back solely on journalism as a profession.

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