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:
“Be virtuous and you will be eccentric.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“All gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in this world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed, must begin in blood.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened—Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)