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On Mark Twain's Writing Features
—— From His Novel The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg

I. Introduction
The pattern of the life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, or “Mark Twain”, for seventy-five years was the pattern of America – from a frontier town to industrical cities, from riverboats to railroads, from an aggressive, a self-important boy toward a troubled and powerful man. He was a genius and romantic observer of that本论文由英语论文网 www.51lunwen.org整理提供 life. At the same time he had a strong suspicion that America was not the Promised Land. This difference between the dream and the reality provoked Clemens to adopt the critical weapons of the humorist(王旭红, 2005).
The purpose of this paper is to discuss Mark Twain's writing features, the characters’ features, as well as themes revealed in his works, especially from his great novel The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.
II. About Mark Twain and His Major Works
1. Life background of Mark Twain
Mark Twain，pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, spent his early life in the river town of Hannibal, Missouri, strategically located on the banks of the Mississippi. Before the Civil War, crowds of people arrived at the town before heading for the west. When he was twelve, his father died, and he was apprenticed to a printer. His schooling was brief, and at seventeen he left home and traveled in the southwest and west for the next fifteen years, working first as an traveling printer, then as a Mississippi River pilot, and as a miner, mine speculator and journalist in Nevada.
It was in Nevada that he first used the pen name, “Mark Twain”, which spoke of his love of the Mississippi River and his river life. “Mark twain” was always a welcome river call meaning “two fathoms” and indicating that the water was deep enough for safe passage. In Nevada, he dreamed of striking it rich, but failed. Instead he supported himself by newspaper reporting, specializing in humorous feature stories. With the publication of his Jumping Frog story, now known as The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, the pen name “Mark Twain” soon attracted the national attention. In 1867, he traveled to Europe and the Holy Land —Palestine. The journey resulted in The Innocents Abroad(1869) which soon became a best seller.
On February 2, 1870, he married a wealthy eastern lady, Olivia Langdon, thus beginning thirty-four years of loving and extraordinarily close companionship. In 1872, his second book Roughing It, which recounted his experiences in本论文由英语论文网 www.51lunwen.org整理提供 Nevada, was published. The family settled in Hartford, Connecticut, where Mark Twain met Charles Dudley Warner and William Dean Howells, the most influential literary critic of the day. Then he finished another work, The Gilded Age (1874) with Warner. Mark Twain’s first real novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) helped him become one of the greatest novelists America has ever produced.
Mark Twain’s later life was plagued by business disappointments and the deaths of loved ones, his oldest daughter, his wife and his youngest daughter. His works became even more sarcastic. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) was an attack on racial discrimination. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900), which made troubled inquiries into the nature of man himself, was probably the best of his powerful pessimistic tales.
2. His major works
(1). Earlier works
Clemens’s