mark twain. samuel langhorne clemens grew up in hannibal, missouri formal education ended at 12...
TRANSCRIPT
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
• grew up in Hannibal, Missouri
• formal education ended at 12 (father died 1847)
• as a young man, a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River
• “Mark Twain,” means two fathoms, a safe depth for a riverboat.
1861, avoided Civil War by going west
Virginia City Territorial Enterprise as a reporter
combined writing with public lecturing and foreign travelinginternational reputation as
humoristic-frontier-philosopher
by 1900, America’s foremost celebrity
• With the publication of his frontier tale, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”, Twain became nationally famous.
• Twain claims to have overheard the story he bases “The Notorious Jumping Frog…” while he was at the Angels Hotel
Twain’s Literary Style• Characters are common people - Ordinary people ordinary situations
• Frame Narrative- - Story within a story
• Regional/Vernacular Dialect – spoken by definable groups of people from a particular
geographic region, economic group, or social class
• Tall Tale– Humorous situations – Wildly exaggerated details– Bold, but sometimes foolish, characters– Characters with extra-ordinary or superhuman abilities – Not intended to be believable
• Satire – The literary art of ridiculing a folly or vice in order to expose or
correct it• Local Color
– portrayal of behaviors distinctive to a region, such as speech, behavior, dress, food, beliefs, etc.
Misspellin
gs, grammatical
errors,
inventive
punctuation, loose
sentence structure,
colloquial phrase
Jim Smiley Story
NARRATOR
Wheeler