1、A Mirror of America,MARK TWIN OF MISSISSIPPI,CONTENTS,PART ONE,First part. (His exeperience) 1.Early life experience 2.His Marriage 3.In His Middle Ages 4.His Later Life 5.His Death,Twains real name was SamuelClemens.“Mark Twain“,whichmeans“watermark two“,was acall used by sailors on the Mississippi
2、 to warn shipmates that they were coming into shallow water.,The Name of Mark Twain,Mark Twain (1835 -1910),Mark Twain was a great American writer, and he was also a famous speaker.,Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) was born in Florida and he was not a healthy baby. In fact, he was not expected
3、to live through the first winter. But with his mothers tender care, he managed to survive. As a boy, he caused much trouble for his parents. He used to play jokes on all of his friends and neighbors. He didnt like to go to school, and he constantly ran away from home.,Early life experience,Born in a
4、 little town in Mississippi,At 11, he lost his father,At 13, he stopped schooling,Tramp printer,Steamboat pilot on the Mississippi,Confederate guerrilla,Prospector,Reporter on the far western frontier,Traveler abroad,His Marriage,At 34 years old he married Olivia Langdon Clemens, daughter of a New Y
5、ork coal magnate, a member of the countrys wealthy elite. She would be partner, editor, and fellow traveler in success and failure for the next thirty-five years.,In His Middle Ages,By 1900 Twain had become Americas foremost celebrity. He was invited to attend ship launchings, anniversary gatherings
6、, political conventions, and countless dinners. Reporters met him at every port of call, anxious to print a new quip from the famous humorist. To enhance his image, he took to wearing white suits and loved to stroll down the street and see people staring at him.,His Later Life,There are many tragic
7、events in his later life: the failure of his investments, his fatiguing travels and lectures in order to pay off his debts, and added to this, the death of his wife and two daughters which left him absolutely inconsolable. Some critics link these tragic events with the change of style in his later w
8、orks, from an optimist and humorist to an almost despairing determinist.,His Death,Mark Twain died of illness on April 21, 1910. When he passed away, newspapers around the country declared, “The whole world is mourning.” By then, Sam Clemens had long since ceased to be a private citizen. He had beco
9、me Mark Twain, a proud possession of the American nation.,PART TWO,Second part. (His writing) 1.Mark Twain and the Mississippi. 2.Major Works. 3.Writing Features,Mark Twain and the Mississippi,Mark Twain loved the great river so much that he always went in the direction of the nearby Mississippi. Ma
10、ny of his great works are set in the background of the Mississippi River,such as the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Life on the Mississippi.,Samuel Clemens Major Works,The Gilded Age 镀金时代 written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner Life on the Mississippi 密
11、西西比河上 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court 亚瑟王朝里的康涅狄格州美国佬 The Man That Corrupted Hardleybug 败坏了哈德莱堡的人 The Mysterious Stranger 神秘的陌生人 Autobiography These works contain bitter attacks on the human race,The Innocents Abroad 傻子国外旅行记 Roughing It艰难岁月 Puddnhead Wilson傻瓜维尔逊 The Prince and the Pauper王子
12、与贫民 American Claimant美国申请人,Mark Twains Writing Features,Mark Twains Writing Features,He often described persons who was innocent, simple, naive, and ignorant as his heroes or heroines.,PART THREE,third part. (Writing style) 1.Life and Writing 2.a Local Colorist 3.Use of Vernacular 4.Humor,Mark Twain
13、s Life and Writing:,Mark Twain is a great literary giant of America, whom H.L.Mencken considered “the true father of our national literature.” With works like Adventure of Huckleberry Finn 哈克贝利芬历险记(1884) and Life on the Mississippi密西西比河上的生活 (1883) Twain shaped the worlds view of America and made a m
14、ore extensive combination of American folk humor and serious literature than previous writers had ever done.Mark Twain, Pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was born on November 30, 1835, in Missouri, and grew up in the river town of Hannibal. After his father died, he began to seek his own fortune
15、 .He once worked as a journeyman printer, a steamboat pilot, a newspaper columnist and as a lecturer. Twains writing took the form of humorous journalism of the time, and it enabled him to master the technique of narration.,Twain as a Local Colorist,Twain is also known as a local colorist, who prefe
16、rred to present social life through portraits of the local characters of his regions, including people living in that area, the landscape, and other peculiarities like the customs, dialects, costumes and so on. Consequently, the rich material of his boyhood experience on the Mississippi became the e
17、ndless resources for his fiction, and the Mississippi valley and the West became his major theme. Unlike James and Howells, Mark Twain wrote about the lower-class people, because they were the people he knew so well and their life was the one he himself had lived. Moreover he successfully used local
18、 color and historical settings to illustrate and shed light on the contemporary society.,Twains Use of Vernacular,Another fact that made Twain unique is his magic power with language, his use of vernacular. His words are colloquial, concrete and direct in effect, and his sentence structures are simp
19、le, even ungrammatical, which is typical of the spoken language. And Twain skillfully used the colloquialism to cast his protagonists in their everyday life. Whats more, his characters, confined to a particular region and to a particular historical moment, speak with a strong accent, which is true o
20、f his local colorism. Besides, different characters from different literary or cultural backgrounds talk differently, as is the case with Huck, Tom, and Jim. Indeed, with his great mastery and effective use of vernacular, Twain has made colloquial speech an accepted, respectable literary medium in t
21、he literary history of the country. His style of language was later taken up by his descendants, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, and influenced generations of letters.,His Humor,Mark Twains humor is remarkable, too. It is fun to read Twain to begin with, for most of his works tend to be funn
22、y, containing some practical jokes, comic details, witty remarks, etc., and some of them are actually tall tales(荒诞不经的故事). By considering his experience as a newspaperman, Mark Twain shared the popular image of the American funny man whose punning, facetious, irreverent articles filled the newspaper
23、s, and a great deal of his humor is characterized by puns, straight-faced exaggeration, repetition, and anti-climax, let alone tricks of travesty and invective. However, his humor is not only of witty remarks mocking at small things or of farcical elements making people laugh, but a kind of artistic
24、 style used to criticize the social injustice and satirize the decayed romanticism.,Mark Twains Masterpieces,PART FOUR,Fourth part. (Others) 1.His Famous Words 2.A Mirror of America,His Famous Words,His Famous Words,The Project,A Mirror of America,1. “Mirror” here means a person who gives a true rep
25、resentation or description of the country. 2. Generally speaking, all literary giants in human history are also great historians, thinkers and philosophers. Their works often reveal more truth than many political essays. 3. Mark Twain was one of these giants, and his life and works are a mirror of America of his time.,THANK YOU,
