March 2012 Guest Editor Alan Bradley on Mark Twain...
The book. Ernest Hemingway wrote, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn.'” I believe he was understating the case. It was a family copy of Huckleberry Finn that first put my feet on the road to being a writer. Its glories have never dimmed.
Fresh from his escapades with Tom Sawyer, with six thousand dollars in the bank, Huck Finn faces a new challenge: his father, Pap, who wants Huck's fortune and will stop at nothing to get his hands on it. Escaping from Pap, Huck meets Miss Watson's slave, Jim, who has run away after learning that Miss Watson may sell him. Jim plans to head north, find work, and buy his wife and children out of slavery. Huck joins him on a salvaged raft, beginning a raucous journey that transforms into a deep reckoning with human frailty and the hypocrisy of the antebellum South.
Mark Twain is the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835 – 1910). He was born and brought up in the American state of Missouri and, because of his father’s death, he left school to earn his living when he was only twelve. He was a great adventurer and travelled round America as a printer; prospected for gold and set off for South America to earn his fortune. He returned to become a steam-boat pilot on the Mississippi River, close to where he had grown up. The Civil War put an end to steam-boating and Clemens briefly joined the Confederate army – although the rest of his family were Unionists! He had already tried his hand at newspaper reporting and now became a successful journalist. He started to use the alias Mark Twain during the Civil War and it was under this pen name that he became a famous travel writer. He took the name from his steam-boat days – it was the river pilots’ cry to let their men know that the water was two fathoms deep.
Mark Twain was always nostalgic about his childhood and in 1876 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published, based on his own experiences. The book was soon recognised as a work of genius and eight years later the sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was published. The great writer Ernest Hemingway claimed that 'All modern literature stems from this one book.'
Mark Twain was soon famous all over the world. He made a fortune from writing and lost it on a typesetter he invented. He then made another fortune and lost it on a bad investment. He was an impulsive, hot-tempered man but was also quite sentimental and superstitious. He was born when Halley’s Comet was passing the Earth and always believed he would die when it returned – this is exactly what happened.
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