Samuel Langhorne Clemens Mark Twain as the Father of Modern American Literature

Twain is considered the father of modern American literature and is known in particular for his classic novel The Adventures of huckleberry Finn (1884). Breaking with the genteel traditions of the nineteenth century, Twain developed a lively, vernacular narrative style which served as the vehicle for his satirical observations concerning human folly and social injustice and which, during his lifetime, led to widespread denunciation of his works as coarse and improper. Subsequently, however, Twain’s works have come to be regarded as the first and finest literary expression of the American spirit of pragmatism, egalitarianism, and honesty.

Ernest Hemingway wrote: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn…. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”

Clemens grew up in the Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri, and he later noted that the river and the activities it supported provided some of the happiest moments of his childhood. At age twelvehe quit school to become a printer’s apprentice; by the time he was seventeen he was also writing stories and sketches for the newspaper she helped print.

During the late 1850s Clemens piloted steamboats on the Mississippi, a job he held until the river was closed to commercial traffic during the Civil War. After brief service in the Confederate militia, he traveled west, working as a silver miner and reporter in Nevada and California. During this period Clemens began writing under the pseudonym Mark Twain, an expression used by riverboat crews to indicate that the water at a given spot was two fathoms deep and therefore easily navigable.

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In 1865 he published his first important sketch, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” in a New York periodical. The story was widely popular and was reprinted two years later in Twain’sfirst book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches (1867), which appeared just as the author embarked on a cruise to Europe and the Middle East. The satirical letters Twain wrote to two American newspapers during this voyage proved immensely popular and were later collected as The Innocents Abroad; or, The NewPilgrim’s Progress (1869). The success of this volume and Twain’sgrowing reputation as a lecturer established him as the leading American humorist. In 1874 Twain published his first novel, The Gilded Age, written in conjunction with Charles Dudley Warner. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a children’s book chronicling the adventures of a mischievous boy in a Mississippi River town, appeared two years later wide acclaim, and Twain immediately afterward began work on a sequel centering on Tom’s friend Huckleberry Finn. According to Twain, Huck was inspired by the real-life Tom Blankenship, and Twain’s description of Blankenship in his Autobiography could serve equally well for Hauck: “He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good heart as ever any boy had. His liberties were totally unrestricted. He was the only really independent person– boy or man–in the community.”

Huckleberry Finn records Huck’s adventures as he accompanies Jim, an escaped slave, down the Mississippi in a quest forfreedom. Amid abundant social satire provided by the various characters and situations Huck and Jim encounter, the narrative focuses on Huck’sdeveloping moral independence from the teachings of his society, and critics agree that Huckleberry Finn far surpasses Tom Sawyer in the depth of both its characters and its themes. Although many of Twain’s contemporaries objected to the novel’svernacular dialogue, coarse subject matter, and forthright social criticism, Huckleberry Finn was a great popular success. During the late 1880s and 1890s, Twain suffered a series of major financial reverses, including the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in the development of the unsuccessful Paigetypesetting machine, and many of his later works were written with the specific aim of making money. He also resumed lecturing to augment his earnings, and by 1900 he had repaid the vast bulk of his debts. As a result of the hardships of the 1890s and the personal tragedies of theearly 1900s, which included the deaths of his wife and two of his threedaughters, Twain’s natural pessimism deepened into fatalistic despair, and his work became more introspective and polemic. Critics have noted signs of this developing attitude in Twain’s works as early as Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, published in 1889, butnote that its most overt expression is contained in the essay Whites Man? (1906), wherein humanity is depicted as inherently foolish and self-destructive.

Twain died in 1910, and his Autobiographywas posthumously published in 1924. Scholars recognize in Twain a man divided in outlook between comic and tragic perceptions of existence. Throughout his career he looked back yearningly to the happy days of his youth on the shores of the Mississippi, finding in his memories spritual rejuvenation and inspiration. At the same time he was skeptical about the wisdom of humanity and the possibility of progress in human society. His longing for an idealized past as a haven from an increasingly hostile presentis evident in most of his major works of fiction. However, Twain also believed that humanity had been given a chance to remedy its situation in the New World, where the foolish superstitions and false hierarchies of Western Europe could be replaced with egalitarianism and true progress represented by improved living conditions. As a result, Twain’sworks offer a compelling vision of the American frontier.

InHuckleberry Finn, for example, the frontier as exemplified by the Mississippi River allows Huck to escape the moral and social strictures of civilization and, confronted by the awesome power and beauty of nature, to develop an awareness of the importance of such simple values courage, honesty, and common sense. Twain remains one of the most widely read authors in American literature, and, from the prime of his career through the present, his work has remained an object of critical puzzlement and public controversy. While quick to praise his wit, inventiveness, and mastery of colloquial language, critics have not reached a consensus on the serious elements of Twain’s fiction. Scholars have noted that, although Twain addressed a number of political and philosophical topics, especially in his later work, he often appeared to support conflicting sides of the same issues. Twain’s detractors, similarly, have censured–and often banned- his work for ideologically varied reasons, accusing it of profanity, misanthropy, and, more recently in the case of Huckleberry Finn, racism in its characterization of Jim. Perhapsthe author anticipated the volatility of his body of work when, in the preface to Huckleberry Finn, he wrote: “[Persons) attempting tofind a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plotin it will be shot.” That Twain’s oeuvre continues to provokesuch interest and debate is testament to the enduring power of itssatire and of its ideas