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