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:
“What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth. No smallest atom of our moral, mental, or physical structure can stand still a year. It grows—it must grow; nothing can prevent it.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Man is the Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion—several of them.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Familiarity breeds contempt. How accurate that is. The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be be under it, inspiring the cabbages.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)