earliest works include a series of letters published in regional newspapers that reported the risk and adventure of life on the frontier. Sensing America’s appetite for “news,” especially the sensational kind, Clemens often peppered his reports with outlandish hoaxes and tall tales, which often caused controversy as readers assumed they were just tricks and fictional stories.
“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”(Mark Twain,1865) brought Mark Twain recognition from a wider public.But Mark Twain’s full literary career began to blossom with a travel book Innocents Abroad(Mark Twain,1869),an account of American tourists in Europe which pokes fun at the pretentious, decadent and undemocratic Old World in a satirical tone. Roughing It(Mark Twain,1872), like other best works that drew upon the scenes and emotions of his boyhood and youth, describes a journey that works its way farther and farther west through Nevada to San Francisco and then to Hawaii. Life on the Mississippi(Mark Twain,1883) tells a story of his boyhood ambition to become a riverboat pilot, this time up and down the Mississippi.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer(Mark Twain,1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(Mark Twain,1884), are two of the best. They proved themselves to be the milestone in American literature. The childhood of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in the Mississippi is a record of a vanished way of life in the pre-Civil War Mississippi valley. The books are noted for their unpretentious, colloquial yet poetic style, their wide-ranging humor, and their universally shared dream of perfect innocence and freedom. The former is usually regarded as a classic book written for boys about their particular horrors and joys, while the latter, being a boy’s book specially written for the adults, is Twain’s most representative work, describing a journey down the Mississippi undertaken by two fugitives, Huck and Jim. Their episodic set of encounters presents a sample of the small-town world of America and a survey of the social world from the bank of the river that runs through the heart of the country.
The Gilded Age(Mark Twain,1873) demonstrates the coexistence of Twain’s usual high spirits of optimism with a caustic and increasingly bleak view of human nature. Written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, the novel explored the scrupulous individualism in a world of fantastic speculation and unstable values, and gave its name to the get-rich-quick years of the post-Civil War era.(张昌宋,2006:260-261)
(2). His later works
Twain’s dark view of the society became more self-evident in the works published later in his life.
In A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court( Mark Twain,1889), a parable of colonialization, Twain follows the journey of a representative of modern technology and ideas into a historically backward, feudal society. Offering to develop the Arthurian world and rid it of superstition, Hank Morgan destroys it, instead of modernizing it, A similar mood of despair permeates The tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson(1894), which shows the disastrous effects of slavery on the victimizer and the victim alike and reveals to us a Mark Twain whose conscience as a white Southerner was tormented by fear and remorse. By the turn of the century, with the publication of The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg(Mark Twain,1900), the change in Mark Twain from an optimist to an almost despairing pessimist could be felt and his cynicism and disillusionment
本论文由英语论文网提供整理,提供论文代写,英语论文代写,代写论文,代写英语论文,代写留学生论文,代写英文论文,留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。