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:
“The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of ungraceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.”
—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)
“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Michelangelo said to Pope Julius II, ‘Self negation is noble, self-culture is beneficent, self-possession is manly, but to the truly great and inspiring soul they are poor and tame compared to self-abuse.’ Mr. Brown, here, in one of his latest and most graceful poems refers to it in an eloquent line which is destined to live to the end of time—’None know it but to love it, None name it but to praise.’”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)