Mark Twain (redirected from Sieur Louis de Conte)

Twain, Mark 

(pen name; real name, Samuel Langhorne Clemens). Born Nov. 30, 1835, in Florida, Mo.; died Apr. 21, 1910, in Redding, Conn. American writer.

Twain grew up in the town of Hannibal, Mo., on the Mississippi River. Beginning in 1853 he lived in various places around the country. He worked as a pilot on the Mississippi and prospected for silver in Nevada and for gold in California. Throughout this period, Twain wrote for various newspapers. In 1865 he won renown for a story modeled on backwoods yarns, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”

In 1867, Twain traveled to Europe and Palestine; his book based on the trip, The Innocents Abroad (1869), was a huge success that established folk humor as a legitimate literary genre. The Innocents is full of pride in Twain’s native country—a country unmarked by feudal oppression, servility, or landlessness. The book’s humor enhances its passionate affirmation of national culture. In 1872, Twain published an autobiographical work about the Far West, Roughing It (published in Russian translation under the title Nalegke [Traveling Light] in 1959). Here, too, the narrator is an “innocent,” a facetious braggart, and a master of the pointedly harsh simile. Twain’s novel The Gilded Age (1873), written jointly with C. D. Warner, mirrored the age of speculations and swindles that followed the Civil War in the United States—a time of “mad money” and disappointed hopes. Twain’s early writings are at times bitterly satirical; most of his world-renowned stories, however, written in the early 1870’s and first published in collected form in “Old and New Sketches” (1875), are contagiously cheerful. Their boisterous humor conveys the still unexpended vigor of American democracy and the country’s ability to laugh at its own weaknesses. The persona of the “innocent” and the comic device of reduction to the absurd are used to reveal the illogical under the mask of the familiar.

From 1871 to 1891, Twain lived in Hartford, Conn. The “frontier” writer found it hard to breathe in the atmosphere of New England, with its literary and moral taboos. Twain’s increasingly critical attitude toward his bourgeois surroundings is reflected in his Letter From the Recording Angel, written in 1887 and published in 1946.

A series of sketches by Twain, Old Times on the Mississippi, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875. This was followed, in 1876, by The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883, consisted of sketches about the old times as well as about contemporary life. Next came The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in England in 1884 and in the United States in 1885. In all these books, the author communicates a sense of distance between America’s past and its present. Free of former illusions, Twain now recognizes the cruel and savage aspects of American democracy even in times past.

Twain’s books about the American past, marked by critical acuity and a profound immersion in the reality of everyday life, embody conceptions that are still valid today. In the autobiographical Tom Sawyer, the world of childhood defends itself against the proper and the pious. In Life on the Mississippi, piloting is extolled as a science. While Huckleberry Finn begins and ends with boyhood adventures recalling those of Tom Sawyer, the adventures in this case are merely a framework; the main part of the book is a sharply critical representation of the American backwoods and the harshness and venality of daily life. The novel is written from Huck’s point of view, and American life is seen through his eyes. Here, the homeless hero of Twain’s earlier work has acquired a new dimension, combining simpleminded-ness with unusual sensitivity. A similar range of feelings marks the figure of the runaway slave Jim, whose portrayal is completely realistic and poetic at the same time; along with a childishly trusting nature and the ability to interpret signs, Jim is endowed with generosity and delicacy of soul. These two simpleminded outcasts floating down the unspoiled river, past unprepossessing provincial towns, have been found congenial by 20th-century writers. Faulkner counted them among his favorite characters, and Hemingway’s observation is famous: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn” (Sobr. soch., vol. 2, Moscow, 1968, p. 306). The book’s remarkable qualities, which Hemingway recognized, are the perceptive insights about America’s provincial heartland, the poetic imagery set in contrast to hypocrisy and self-satisfaction, the fluency of composition, and the boldly innovative language with its use of colloquialisms, slang, and Negro dialect.

Throughout Twain’s life, his thoughts turned repeatedly to the Middle Ages. The hierarchical society of the past, which offended his democratic nature, seemed to him grotesque. In 1882 he published The Prince and the Pauper, an allegorical tale that vehemently rejects the world of social barriers and privileges. Another fictional work by Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court, published in 1889, is a sharp parody tinged with plebeian militancy.

A difficult time in Twain’s life began in the early 1890’s. The failure of his publishing firm in 1894 forced him to work at a feverish pace and to make a year-long lecture tour around the world in 1895. The death of a daughter dealt him another blow. Bitterness permeates much of Twain’s writing in his last two decades. The traditional beliefs of the American philistine are turned inside out in the frequently misanthropic opinions of the hero of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894). Bitter disillusionment with bourgeois democracy compelled the latter-day Twain to expose the illusory nature of standards and ideals inculcated in childhood. In the short novel The Mysterious Stranger, published in 1916, he reexamined the dominant motifs of his life’s work. The freedom of a childhood lived on the riverside, in the spirit of Tom Sawyer, is now placed in a somber medieval context. While Satan’s speeches, mocking human self-delusion, are fed by Twain’s despair, they are also the vehicle for the author’s famous words about the power of laughter—a weapon that nothing can withstand.

The 20th century acknowledges Twain as a classic of world literature and at the same time as a genuinely national writer—one who has revealed the America where the tragic exists side by side with the comic, and horror with poetry. One of the greatest humorists of modern times, Twain is also a beloved children’s writer. Twain won early recognition in Russia: a translation of his story of the jumping frog appeared in 1872 in Birzhevye vedomosti (Exchange Gazette), and The Gilded Age (under the title Mishurnyi vek [Age of Tinsel]) was printed in 1874 in Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland). Twain was warmly praised by M. Gorky and A. Kuprin, and his popularity has continued to grow throughout the USSR.

WORKS

Writings, vols. 1–25. New York-London, 1907–18.
Writings, vols. 1–37. New York, 1922–25.
Letters, vols. 1–2. Edited by A. B. Paine. New York-London, 1917.
Mark Twain’s Autobiography, vols. 1–2. New York-London, 1924.
Mark Twain’s Notebook. New York-London, 1935.
In Russian translation:
Sobr. Soch., vols. 1–12. Moscow, 1959–61. (Introductory essay by M. Mendel’son.)

REFERENCES

Mendel’son, M. Mark Tven. Moscow, 1958.
Startsev, A. Mark Tven i Amerika. [Moscow, 1963.]
Foner, P. Mark Tven—sotsial’nyi kritik. Moscow, 1961. (Translated from English.)
De Voto, B. A. Mark Twain’s America and Mark Twain at Work. Boston, 1967.
Geismar, M. Mark Twain: An American Prophet. Boston, 1970.
Mark Twain: The Critical Heritage. London, 1971.
Levidova, I. Mark Tven: Bibliograficheskii ukazatel’. Moscow, 1974.

M. B. LANDOR