Mark Twain
Samuel Clemens (1835–1910), better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, grew up in the Mississippi River frontier town of Hannibal, Missouri. Early 19th-century American writers tended to be flowery, sentimental, or ostentatious—partially because they were still trying to prove that they could write as elegantly as the English. Hemingway, in Green Hills of Africa, wrote that many Romantics "wrote like exiled English colonials from an England of which they were never a part to a newer England that they were making... They did not use the words that people have always used in speech, the words that survive in language." In the same essay, Hemingway stated that all American fiction comes from Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain's style, based on vigorous, realistic, colloquial American speech, gave American writers a new appreciation of their national voice. Twain was the first major author to come from the interior of the country, and he captured its distinctive, humorous slang and iconoclasm. For Twain and other American writers of the late 19th century, realism was not merely a literary technique: It was a way of speaking truth and exploding worn-out conventions. Twain is best known for his works Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Read more about this topic: American Realism, Writers
Famous quotes by mark twain:
“There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow. Yet it was the schoolboy who said ‘Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.’”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“There isn’t a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled as ‘American.’”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The election makes me think of a story of a man who was dying. He had only two minutes to live, so he sent for a clergyman and asked him, ‘Where is the best place to go to?’ He was undecided about it. So the minister told him that each place had its advantages—heaven for climate, and hell for society.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“To succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)