Mark Twain's Satire

MINISTRY OF HIGHER AND SECONDARY SPECIALISED EDUCATIONOF THE REPUBLIC OF UZBEKISTAN
GULISTAN STATE UNIVERSITY
The English and Literature department
Kan Anna’s qualification work on speciality 5220100,English philology on theme:
Mark Twain’s Satire
Supervisor: Tojiev Kh.
Gulistan-2006

Contents
I. Introduction
1.1. General characteristics of the work
2.1. Some words about Mark Twain
II. Main part
1.2.Early life of Mark Twain
2.2. Beginning of literary career, Twain’s firstsuccessful experiences
3.2. Marriage and wife’s influence on Mark Twain’sliterary works
4.2. “The Guilded Age” as the first significant work
5.2. Critical analysis of “The Adventures of TomSawyer
6.2. “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” as the mostsignificant work
7.2. Later years of Mark Twain
8.2. Simpletons abroad (American literature abroad)
III. Conclusion
1.3. Afterwards to Mark Twain’s literary significance
IV Bibliography

Introduction
 
1.1 Generalcharacteristics of the work
The theme of our qualification work sounds as following: “Mark Twain andhis Satire” The brief characteristics of our work can be seen from thefollowing features:
The topicality of this work causesseveral important points. We dare to say that Mark Twain always remains topicalfor us because his works, even written more than a century ago his immortalhumor, tell about the modern things and phenomena which happen in our lives,such as humans’ qualities, the problems of friendship, support, greed,populism, childhood, love, revenge, etc. And our work becomes much more topicalbecause of the reason that Mark Twain is still one of the most popular Americanwriters read by readers. We are sure that there is hardly a man in our countrycan be found, who has never heard of adventures of Tom Sawyer, HuckleberryFinn, The Prince and the Pauper, Yankee from Connecticut, etc. We are alsoconvincer that every intellectual learner of English has these works ashand-books for themselves. So the significance of our work can be proved by thefollowing reasons:
a) Mark Twain for the Americanliterature is of the same value as Chekhov for the Russians, Navoi for theUzbeks, Gachec for the Checks, etc.
b)       Though written about his times, humoristic works of Twainreflect the real state of affairs happened in our modern life, and even such scenesmight happen with the readers of our qualification work.
c) Twain’s books are also worth studying for their brilliant humour,metaphoric language, ideas and dialogues within the works.
Having based upon the topicality ofthe theme we are able to formulate the general purposes of our qualificationwork.
a)       To study, analyze, and sum up the humour- essence of Twain’sworks.
b)       To analyze humoristic works of the writer.
c)       To prove the idea of modernity in Shakespeare’s “MidsummerNight”.
c)       To mention and compare between themselves the critical opinionsconcerning to the play.
d) To take time parallels between Twain’s times and reality of nowadays.
e) To study Mark Twain’s heritage and greatness and significance on the baseof his works “Huckleberry Finn”, “Tom Sawyer”, “Yankee from Connecticut”, “ThePrince and the Pauper”.
If we say about the new informationused within our work we may note that the work studies the problem from themodern positions and analyzes the modern trends appeared in this subject forthe last ten years. For instance, the novelty concludes in a wide collecting ofInternet materials dealing with Mark Twain’s heritage.
The practical significance of thework concludes in the following items:
a)       The work could serve as a good source of materials foradditional reading by students at schools, colleges and lyceums.
b)       The problem of difficult understanding stylistic devices couldbe a little bit easier,
c)       Those who would like to possess a perfect knowledge of Englishwill find our work useful and practical.
d) Our qualification work is recognition of greatness of our outstandingAmerican writer.
Having said about the scholars whodealt with the same theme earlier we may mention B.Shaw, A.Anikst, A.Paine, Dr.Jonson,Alfred Bates and many others.
We used in our work scientificapproaches methods of general analysis.
The novelty of the work is concludedin including the modern interpretations of the Twain’s heritage.
Compositional structure of my work consists of four major parts –Introduction, Main part, Conclusion, and Bibliography. The brief content ofeach part is to be presented for your attention.
We subdivided the introductory material into two sections… The firstsection gives some brief characteristics of the work, its aims and goals,problems and methods of investigation. The second item reveals commonbiographic milestones of Mark Twain, which were significant for the subjectmatter of our theme. The main part bears eight items in itself. Each itemsreveal the concrete problem. In the first paragraph we reflected the earlyyears of Mark Twain’s life, precisely his young years, when Twain worked on theMississippi, and the experiences of which were later reflected in all the worksof satirist. The second item demonstrates the analysis of satirical works andhis novel “Simpletons Abroad”. In the third paragraph of the main part we tookinto consideration the problem of the influence of wife onto the work of Twain.The fourth item tells us about the satiric novel “The Guilded Age”, — secondserious work of Twain. The next two paragraphs of the main part take intoconsideration Mark Twain’s the most famous and magnificent works, in which hissatirical talent appeared most greatly, — “Tom Sawyer” and “Adventures ofHuckleberry Finn” .The seventh item tells about the later years of Mark Twain,which were characterized by the crisis of his creative activity, upsetting thereality of life, and sharpening of social contradictions. The last paragraphtells about the history of the American literary invasion in Europe owing toappearance of Twain’s works. In the Conclusion work we gave some notes concerningthe literary significance of Twain’s works, their novelty and actuality formodern readers. The qualification work contains to the bibliography, whichmentions the list of literature used in the frame of our work.
2.1 Mark Twain — a great American writer — contributedan enormous contribution to literature of his country
Nevertheless,it is not all that would be possible to say about Twain. Mark Twain is one ofthe most important figures of the American life and the American culture as awhole. He was bound by the incalculable links with the move of development ofhis country, its national particularity, and social contradictions, and thislink is felt deeply through all of his creative activity.
Leaving outof the folk layers, he became the brilliant representative of the Americanhumanitarian intellectuals. Besides, under that layer, he did not«run», like many of his congeners, on the positions of dominatingclass, but he has occupied the critical position on all of the main questions concerninglives of his country, having criticized the politics dominating in his country,dominating religion, and dominating moral rules.
Theimportance of Twain as the artistic historian of the USA is difficult tooverestimate.
Bernard Show oncesaid that a researcher of the American society of the XIX century would have tocome to address to Twain not less, than a historian of the French society ofthe XVIII century would have to treat to the works of Voltaire. In developmentof Bernard Show’s thought we think that it is necessary to add that those whowant to knew more about the American life of the XX century, up to the mostalive contemporary, will also find a lot of important and actual materials inTwain's works – with their shrewdness and generalizing power of the talent ofthis great American!
Theimportance and the role of Twain as the outrageously forming power in theAmerican literature does not only weaken through the year passing, but it stillbecomes firmly established again and again with an increasing power.
«Thewhole modern American literature came out of one book of Mark Twain, which isidentified as „Huckleberry Finn“. This is the best of all ourbooks… There was nothing like to be existed in our literature before it.Nothing which could be equal to this book has been still written ».
These wordsbelong to one of the largest and most influential masters and trailblazers ofthe modern literature of the USA — to Ernest Hemingway.
“ Persuaded,"wrote Bernard Shaw
As we wrote above, B. Show wrote about Mark Twain, «that the futurehistorian of America will find your works indispensable to him as a Frenchhistorian finds the political tracts of Voltaire.» By his ownparticipation, no artist in our literature save Lincoln is so broad a segmentof typical American experience in the last century, Langhorne Clemens, known bythe most famous pen name that an American ever bore, is a matchless annalist ofhis times. His life makes those Carry men in Boston and Concord and New Yorkresemble the flowering of talents that blossomed in too retired a k. He knewthe greatest river Mississippi of the continent as Melville knew the high. Hewitnessed the epic of America, the westward tide at its full, with optionkeener than the shallow appraisals of Bret Harte and Joaquin. When in his AutobiographyMark Twain recalls after forty years the faddy of an emigrant lad stabbed todeath by a drunken comrade, and adds, the red life gush from his breast,"we are reminded of Whitman's nation, «I was there»—with thedifference that Walt's immediacy was genitive, Mark's actual. In the activitiesof the external man as well as in actor and temperament, Mark Twain was arepresentative American— idyllic ante-bellum boyhood in a river town, to maturityenmeshed in Toss-purposes of the Gilded Age which he christened, and thence tothe years of mingled hope and disillusion in the Progressive Era. Despite weavowal, «There is not a single human characteristic which can be f labeledas 'American,' » Mark Twain is stamped unforgettably with the brand. If hefailed finally to reconcile reality and ideality, he abs and gave expression toboth. That failure was not his; it belonged to penetration age his incurablyCalvinist mind saw all the events of his life, from son November 30, 1835, inthe village of Florida, Missouri, as a chain of titian forged by some poweroutside his will. Like his Connecticut Yankee as led to reflect upon heredity,«a procession of ancestors that stretches a billion years to the Adam-clamor grasshopper or monkey from whom ace has been so tediously and ostentatiouslyand unprofitably developed.»

Main Part
 
1.2 Early life of Mark Twain
I am persuaded," wroteBernard Shaw about Mark Twain, «that the future historian of America willfind your works indispensable to him as a French historian finds the politicaltracts of tare.» By his own participation, no artist in our literaturesave Lincoln is so broad a segment of typical American experience in the lastcentury, Langhorne Clemens, known by the most famous pen name that an Americanever bore, is a matchless annalist of his times. His life makes those Carry menin Boston and Concord and New York resemble the flowering of talents thatblossomed in too retired a k. He knew the greatest river of the continent asMelville knew the high. He witnessed the epic of America, the westward tide atits full, with option keener than the shallow appraisals of Bret Harte andJoaquin. When in his Autobiography Mark Twain recalls after forty years thefaddy of an emigrant lad stabbed to death by a drunken comrade, and adds, thered life gush from his breast," we are reminded of Whitman's nation,«I was there»—with the difference that Walt's immediacy was genitive,Mark's actual. In the activities of the external man as well as in actor andtemperament, Mark Twain was a representative American— idyllic ante-bellumboyhood in a river town, to maturity enmeshed in Toss-purposes of the GildedAge which he christened, and thence to the years of mingled hope anddisillusion in the Progressive Era. Despite »we avowal, «There is not asingle human characteristic which can be f labeled as 'American,' » MarkTwain is stamped unforgettably with the brand. If he failed finally toreconcile reality and ideality, he abs and gave expression to both. Thatfailure was not his; it belonged to penetration.
 age his incurably Calvinist mind saw all the events of his life, fromson November 30, 1835, in the village of Florida, Missouri, as a chain oftitian forged by some power outside his will. Like his Connecticut Yankee asled to reflect upon heredity, «a procession of ancestors that stretches abillion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom ace has beenso tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed.»
His father, an austere restless Virginian, bequeathed the family a vainhone of fortune from «the Tennessee lands,» like Squire Hawkins in TheGilded Age; he also gave his son an object lesson in failure like the exampleset the father of a genius whom Mark the Baronial once rose to challengeShakespeare of Stratford. The wife and mother, Jane Lampton Clernens ofKentucky pioneer stock, sought by her strong Presbyterianism to balance herhusband's village-lawyer agnosticism; their famous son inherited theself-tormenting conscience with the latter's will to disbelieve. As forderivations more remote Twain the romantic relished his maternal tie with theEarls of Durham through «the American claimant,» while Twain thedemocrat reserved his sole ancestral pride for a Regicide judge, who «didwhat he could toward reducing the list of crowned shams of his day.»
In 1839 the Clemens’s moved to Hannibal, on the west bank of the Mis­sissippi,and set the conditions of boyhood and youth from which flowed the wellspring ofMark Twain's clearest inspiration. Thanks to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, itsaspect in the forties has become the property of millions: the wharf givingupon the turbid waters where rafts and broad-horns, fast packets and gayshowboats passed endlessly, the plank sidewalks where Tom and Becky trudged toschool, the tanyard where Huck's drunken father slept among the hogs, the steepslope of Cardiff (really Holliday's) Hill, the surrounding woods of oak andhickory and sumach, and a few miles downstream the cave where Injun Joe metdeath. Hannibal lay in its halcyon summer between frontier days and theconvulsions of the Civil War, the latter forecast in the mobbing of anoccasional abolitionist and the track­ing down of runaway slaves. On the whole,happiness outweighed grief; prized in retrospect was the large freedom of aboy's life, with the swimming hole and woods full of game, jolly playmatesbanded against a world of adult supremacy, and dinner tables groaning withprodigal hospitality. «It was a heavenly place for a boy,» Hannibal'sfirst citizen remembered.
Sam Clemens' schooling ended early, when he was about twelve. After hisfather's death the lad was apprenticed to a printer's shop—«the poor boyscollege,» Lincoln called it. Lack of formal education doubtless gave thelater Mark Twain an eagerness to have his genius certified by convention, andalso led him occasionally to discover shopworn ideas with a thrill impossibleto sophisticates; but it also delivered him from those cultural stereotypesinto which the genius of New England, for example, for generations had beenpoured. Fatalist that he was, Twain liked to date his career from certainaccidents. The first of them came one day on the streets of Hannibal, when theyoung printer picked up a stray leaf from a book about Joan of Arc, an forthe first time saw magic in the printed word. Henceforth the itch scribblingwas strong upon him. His earliest known appearance in print, crudely humoroussketch called «The Dandy Frightening the Squatter,» appeared in theBoston Carpet Bag of May i, 1852. He left Hannibal the next year, wandering onto New York and Philadelphia, and began to send hometown papers the first ofthose facetious travel pieces which he wrote sporadically for the nexthalf-century. In 1857, after tarrying awhile in Cincinnati, Jie set out for NewOrleans with a notion of shipping for the Amazon. But, lacking funds, he becamea steamboat pilot under the tutelage of Horace Bixby. That veteran graduallytaught him the ever changing aspects of the Mississippi, by sun and starlight,at low water and in flood.
For two years after that Clemens turned his wheel atop the taxes deck,drawing a licensed pilot's high wages, while he gained postgraduate schoolinginhuman nature. Oft quoted is his later assertion: «When I find awell-drawn character in fiction or biography I generally take a warm personalinterest in him, for the reason that I have known him before—met him on the river.»A born worrier, he felt the responsibility that lay within a pilot's hands ashe steered past narrows and snags and sand bars, or for the sake of prestigeraced his rivals until the boiler nearly burst under its head of steam. His oldmaster, many years later, stated that Clemens «knew the river like a book,but he lacked confidence.» One may speculate whether a very humanincertitude, deep in his being, did not chime with a classic type of humor inhis constant self-portrayal as the man who gets slapped: the bumptious yettimid cub of Life on the Mississippi; the fear-bedeviled soldier of «TheCampaign That Failed»; the tenderfoot of Roughing It, setting forest firesand just missing wealth through sheer stupidity; or the harassed travelerlosing his tickets, browbeaten by porters and shopkeepers, falling foul of theauthorities, who appears in a long sequence from the juvenile Snodgrass lettersto A Tramp Abroad.
Clemens' career on the river ended in the spring of 1861 with theoutbreak of hostilities. With brief enthusiasm he joined a Confederate militiaband, savoring the boyish conspiracy of war in its early stages. In the lack ofdiscipline the band soon broke up; and Sam, with qualms about fighting forslavery, yielded to persuasion from his Unionist brother Orion, latelyappointed Secretary of the Territory of Nevada. In July, 1861, the two set outfor the West. The outlines of the story told in Roughing If are true enough:the nineteen-day trip across the plains and Rockies to Carson City; an attack rmining fever that left Sam none the richer; his acceptance of a job on the Vll«giniaCity Enterprise; a journalist's view of San Francisco in flush times; and anewspaper-sponsored voyage to the Sandwich Islands. His dream of becoming amillionaire by a stroke of fortune never forsook him; lingering ift
his blood, the bonanza fever made him a lifelong victim of gold bricks,quick profit schemes, and dazzling inventions. But his return to journalistichumor the vein he had worked in his late teens and early twenties, imitative ofsuch professional humorists as Seba Smith, J. J. Hooper, and B. P. Shillaber 'whose productions every newspaper office abounded—proved to be his real] luckystrike. In 1863 the Missourian of twenty-eight met Artemus Ward o the latter'sWestern lecture tour, and watched a master storyteller in action-the adroittiming, change of pace, and deadpan obliviousness to the point of one's ownwit. Twain's „How to Tell a Story“ (1895) acknowledges theseprofitable lessons.
It was Ward who encouraged him to seek a wider audience than the redshirtedminers of Washoe and nabobs of the Golden Gate. The first fruit of thisencouragement to appear in the East—a piece of jocular sadism against the smallfry who made day and night hideous at resort hotels, „Those BlastedChildren“—was printed early in 1864 by the New York Mercury Meanwhile in1863 Clemens had begun to imitate current funny men like Ward, Orpheus C. Kerr,and Josh Billings, by selecting a pen name, the river-boat man's cry for twofathoms, „Mark Twain.“ Clemens stoutly maintained he appropriated itsoon after an eccentric pilot-journalist of New Orleans Captain Isaiah Sellers,relinquished it by death. No contribution in the New Orleans press, however,has ever been found under that name; also, Sellers' death occurred a year afterClemens adopted this pseudonym. Whether original or borrowed, the name servedan important purpose. It created an alter ego, a public character, whichClemens could foster through the years while doffing it in private as hepleased. It set definable limits to his role of being what the age called a»phunny phellow." A speculative critic might guess that his abidinginterest in transposed identities, twins, and Siamese prodigies mirrored adualism which self-observation would have shown running like a paradox throughhis nature: gullible and skeptical by turns; realistic and sentimental, asatirist who gave hostages to the established order, a frontiersman who bowedhis neck obediently to Victorian mores, and an idealist who loved the trappingsof pomp and wealth. Incessantly he contradicted himself on a variety ofsubjects. His was not a single-track mind, but a whole switcn-yard. Thecreation of two more or less separate identities—Clemens the sensitive andperceptive friend, Mark Twain the robust and astringent humorist springing fromthe same trunk of personality, helped to make him like those ligatured twins inPudd'nhead Wilson, Luigi and Angelo, «a human philopena.»
2.2 Beginning of literary career,Twains first successful experiences
Under the name of Mark Twain the wild-haired Southwesterner began tocontribute to the press yarns swapped about the legislative halls of Carso, thebars and billiard parlors of San Francisco, and the hot stoves of miners onJackass Hill. From these last, about February, 1865, he first heard the old folktale of the Jumping Frog. To the anecdote he added the salt of human valueswhich the genre usually Sacked, in garrulous Simon Wheeler and simple JimSmiley the Frog's owner. Published in the Saturday Press of Kew York, November18,1865, it was swiftly broadcast. The author grumbled in a letter home aboutthe irony of riding high on «a villanous backwoods sketch,» butalready he was tastingjhat sense of popularity_which soon came to be his elixirof life. In October, 1866, back from Honolulu and planted on a SanFrancisco lecture platform, he first encountered another powerful stimulant,the instant response. Early in 1867, at Cooper Union in New York, he won hiseastern spurs, and began to be hailed as rightful heir to Artemus Ward, latelydead of tuberculosis in England. Soon, as his friend William Dean Howellsphrased it, Twain learned «all the stops of that simple instrument,man.» The lecturer's effect upon the writer was great. Increasingly Twaincame to write by ear, testing his books by reading aloud, while making theexpanded anecdote or incident the unit of his literary composition. Sometimes,of course, without benefit of his infectious personal charm, that mane of fieryred hair and hawklike nose, the gestures of an artist's hands, and theinflections of that irresistible drawl, a reader of cold print missed qualitieswhich on the platform redeemed humor of a perishable sort.
«When I began to lecture, and in my earlier writings, my sole ideawas to make comic capital out of everything I saw and heard,» he told thebiographer Archibald Henderson. After his first volume, of chiefly Western sketches,named The Celebrated Jumping Frog (1867), he reinforced this reputation bydistilling a humorous travelogue out of the letters sent back to the AltaCalifornia from his cruise to the Mediterranean and Holy Land on the QuakerCity in 1867. Comic capital was readily furnished by the flood of tourists,affluent merchants and their wives, war profiteers, former army officers onholiday, and clergymen for whom Jerusalem justified the junket, which sweptover the Old World after Appomattox. Knowing themselves to be innocents, theyfaced down their provincialism by brag and cockalorum, and haggling overprices. Mark Twain gladly joined them, joking his way among the shrines andtaboos of antiquity, comparing Como unfavorably with Tahoe, bathing in theJordan, finding any foreign tongue incredibly tunny, and pitying ignorance,superstition, and lack of modern conveniences. 1 he Innocents Abroad (1869)helped to belittle our romantic allegiance to turope, feeding our emergentnationalism. Instantly a best seller, it delighted ^nose Americans in whom«the sense of Newport» (as Henry James later Called it)had never been deeply engrafted. A slender minority like James himself feltthat Mark Twain amused only primitive persons, was the Phji-tines' laureate.Years later, in 1889, in a letter to Andrew Lang, Twain WouU glory in thischarge:
Indeed I have been misjudged, from the first. I have never tried in evensingle instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equippedfor ' either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in thatdirectin ' but always hunted for bigger game—the masses. I have seldomdeliberately trf H to instruct them, but have done my best to entertain them.Yes, you see I have always catered for the Belly and the Members.
Yet this is not the whole story. From an early date, Mark Twain, theplayboy of the Western world, had begun to feel the aspirations of an artist,to crave deeper approval than had come to the cracker-box humorist like SamSlick and Jack Downing. In Honolulu in 1866 the diplomat Anson Burlin-game gavehim advice by which the aged Twain avowed he had lived «for fortyyears»: «Seek your comradeships among your superiors in intellect andcharacter; always climb.» On the Quaker City voyage the Missourian fellunder the refining spell of «Mother» Fairbanks, wife of a prosperousOhio publisher, and tore up those travel letters which she thought crude.Always enjoying petticoat dominion, he eagerly sought her approval of therevised Innocents and was enchanted when she pronounced it
«authentic.» «A name 1 have coveted so long—and secured atlast!» be exclaimed. "/ don't care any­thing about being humorous, orpoetical, or eloquent, or anything of that kind—the end and aim of my ambitionis to he authentic—is to be considered authentic." In a similar thirst forhigher recognition he told Howells, reviewer of Innocents in the Atlantic: «WhenI read that review of yours, I felt like the woman who was so glad her baby hadcorne white.» Nevertheless, as Twain found to his intermittent chagrin,his reputation throughout life kept returning to that of a «phunnyphellow,» turning cartwheels to captivate the groundlings—until at lengthhe built up the defensive attitude expressed to Lang. At Atlantic dinners, the authorof «Old Times on the Mississippi» and Tom Sawyer found himself seatedbelow the salt, ranked by Longfellow and Lowell and Whittier, as well as bysuch adopted sons of Boston as Howells and Aldrich. Despite the new decorum ofhis life and the growing richness of his art, the wild man from the West wasexpected, some time, somehow, to disgrace himself. And, by the meridian ofBoston, he eventually did so, when at the celebrated Whittier birthday dinneron December 17, 1877, he made his speech of innocent gaiety about three drunksin the high Sierras who personated Emerson, Longfellow, and Holmes. The dinerswere shocked, refusing their laughter while he stood solitary (as Howells said)«with his joke dead on his hands.» The next day or so, when Twain'shaunting distrust of himself and his own taste had induced a penitentialhangover, he sent apologies; writing characteristically: «Ah, well, I am agreat and sublime fool. gut then I am God's fool, and all his worksmust be contemplated with respect.» He then begged Howells to exclude himfrom the Atlantic for a while, in the interest of readers' good will. Thegravity with which both the saints and the sinner regarded this incidentreveals the massiveness of the genteel tradition in New England and theprobationary status upon which Mark was kept for so many years.
Between the publication of the Innocents and this indiscretion, Clemenshad taken a wife whose remolding influence has been the subject o£ muchdebate. The story of their courtship is familiar: his first sight of herdelicate face in a miniature carried by betrothal while her father, the richestbusinessman in Elmira, and her kin were slowly won over; and their weddingearly in 1870, with Clemens the bridegroom trying unsuccessfully to establishhimself as a solid newspaper editor in Buffalo, but moving to Hartford in 1871to resume a free-lance life. His veneration of women and their purity wasalmost fanatical. «I wouldn't have a girl that / was worthy of,» hewrote «Mother» Fairbanks before his engagement. «She wouldn'tdo.»
About the sexual make-up of Mark Twain speculation has been indulgedsince the Freudian era. In that famous sophomoric sketch 1601, written inmid-career to amuse his clerical friend Joe Twichell, he had Sir Walter Raleighdescribe «a people in ye uttermost parts of America, y* copulate not untilthey be five-St-thirty years of age.» This, it happens, was the age whenClemens married a semi-invalid wife, as if some inadequacy in himself, some lowsexual vitality, made such a woman his fitting mate. And yet respecting theirphysical love for each other and the fruitfulness of their union, with its fourchildren, no doubt can be raised. What illicit experience might have come to aboy growing up in the accessible world of slavery, and passing his greenmanhood upon river boats and in bonanza towns, can only be guessed at. In lateryears, respecting the idealized Hannibal of his boyhood, he went so far as todeny the existence of sexual irregularities; and by confine-mg his two greatnovels about Hannibal to adolescence he was able in a banner to carry hispoint. Obviously certain taboos about sex, personal as well as conventional,appear in his writings from beginning to end. Unlike friend Howells, heattempted no probing of desire, no analysis of the affinity between man andwoman beyond the calf love of Tom and Becky and [he implausible treatment ofLaura the siren of The Gilded A Only under the protective shield ofmiscegenation, in the person of warm-blooded Negress Roxana Wilson, does heventure approach passion which overleaps". Joan of virgin of exquisite purityplainly is the heroine after his inmost heart fear of sex, like the shrinkingof primitive races and some adolescent from carnality as if it meantdegradation of the body, seems to lie at the roar of Mark Twain's nature. Theexceptions of his occasional bawdry—in and a few unprinted works like hisspeech before the Stomach Club in Paris and his manuscript «Letters fromthe Earth»—but prove the rule, in ridiculing the body and its wayssufficiently to suit the most fanatic Puritan.
Yet Twain was in no sense a misogynist. He loved the company of women, ofthe refined women whose tastes and restraints fitted his own pre­suppositionsabout them. His understanding of the feminine mind has left no more delightfulevidence than «Eve's Diary,» written in 1905 shortly after Olivia'sdeath, so that Adam's final bereavement becomes the epitaph of his own loss:«Wherever she was, there was Eden.»[1] In summary,Mark Twain's personal make-up and the conventions of gentility surrounding thekind of success he aspired to, joined to suppress the recognition of sex as akey motive in human actions—leaving woman not an object of desire but ofreverential chivalry.
3.2 Marriage and wife’s influenceonto Mark twain’s literary works
The effect of his wife upon Twain the artist has provoked latter-daydiscus­sion. One school of thought holds that Clemens was forced, first by hismother and then by his wife, to «make good,» i.e., to make money andbe respectable. Moreover, thanks to the censorship of his wife, they say, hebecame not the New World Rabelais but a frustrated genius incapable of callinghis soul or vocabulary his own. It is clear, however, that proof of Livy's«humiliating» dominion rests largely upon Twain's letters to Howells:that pair of devoted husbands married to invalids who made a gallant littlejoke over being henpecked. The notion that women exercised a gentle tyrannyover their men folk, for the latter's good, always appealed to Mark Twain,schooled in Western theories that man was coarser clay and woman a rare andspecial being (as among the Washoe miners in Roughing It, who chipped m $2,500in gold as a gift at the miraculous sight of a live woman). All his late newencouraged women to reform him improve his taste and manners. His three littledaughters who shared in the family rite knout as «dusting on Papa, and the»angel-fish" of adolescent girls in his Bermudian Indian summer, wereamong the youngest of the sex whose devoted slave he rejoiced to was a kindo£ game in the feudal tradition, which he adored. But to assure thereforethat Twain the genius was henpecked, baffled, unmanned by women in general andLivy in particular is to convert a jest into a cry to agnate converse influenceof husband upon wife something deserves to be aid Twain's vitality rescued herfrom abysses of timorous living, his banter relaxed her serious disposition,and his religious skepticism destroyed her Christian faith.
as for the specific question of censorship, we know that Twainliked to read aloud en jailed the results to his daily composition, usually meetingthe approval he craved, sometimes encountering a chill disfavor to which he wasequally sensitive. He was a poor self-critic and knew it. He plunged into•writing without much plan or foresight. Levy’s judgment in matters of simplegood taste and in pruning wordiness and irrelevance was clearly superior to hisown in the heat of incubation. A careful examination of his manuscripts showsthat Mrs. Clemens, like that other long-standing adviser William Dean Howells,objected to certain vivid words and phrases— «wallow,»«bowels,» «spit,» «rotten,» and realisticallusions to stenches and putrefaction which always tempted Mark Twain, so thathe grumbled about her «steadily weak­ening the English tongue»—but thatin mild profanities (like Huck Finn's «comb me all to hell'') and in rareinclinations toward the risqué (such as the farce of „The RoyalNonesuch“) the author on second thought was his own most attentive censor.He was not above playing an occasional hazard with his critics to see how farhe could skate on thin ice; then doubled on his own track back to safety. Justas he dreamed of the unabashed nakedness of a boy's freedom on a raft floatingdown the Mississippi, now and again he yearned for the lusty old ways ofmedieval speech, „full of unconscious coarsenesses and innocentindecencies,“ „good old questionable stories,“ as theConnecticut Yankee says. But quickly he reminded himself, as he observes in ATramp Abroad, that the license of the printed word had been „sharplycurtailed within the past eighty or ninety years.“ To this curb in themain he gave unstinting consent.
Up to the time of his anchorage in Hartford in 1871, the most importantfacts about Mark Twain are the things that happened to him, shaping hisdevelopment as an artist and filling the granaries of memory. After that datethe chief milestones are the books he wrote out of that accumulation. Hismaturity and self-assurance can be gauged, growing from book to book throughthe next two decades, as he lectured at home and abroad, met the captains ofliterature and politics and finance, read widely if desultorily, and Perfectedhis early journalistic manner until it became one of the great styles Americanletters—easy, incisive, sensitive to nuances of dialect, rich in the resourcesof comedy, satire, irony, and corrosive anger.
The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872) he learned, under emancipationfrom newspaper reporting, to take greater liberties with fact for art's sake.Both books owe such structure as they have to a rough chronology. Upon thisthread Mark Twain the raconteur strings one story after another. The lattervolume offers us almost all the classic types which Americans in general,frontiersmen in particular, had long since favored: the tall tale, themelodramatic shocker, the yarn of pointless garrulity, humor, the canard ofimpossible coincidence, the chain of free association that wanders farther andfarther from its announced subject; the comedy of man in his cups, the animalfable, and the delusions of a lunatic. Paradox, surprise and understatementoften heighten his effects. Anecdote continues to be the fiber of those latertravel books, which show more fluency in repeating the essential pattern, butgrow in world-weariness after the early gusto of the Innocents and theArgonauts. They include A Tramp Abroad (1880), with more travesty of Europeanlanguages, guide books, and art criticism, and Following the Equator (1897),which reports Twain's lecture tour in Australia and India. Inevitable becomehis burlesques of sentimental poetry, parodies of romantic situations, yarnspicked up in new places or recollected from the limbo of years. In this lastbook, however, flippancy at the expense of peoples and customs vanishes whenthe traveler reaches the threshold of Asia, as if the ancient disillusionedtorpor of that continent had stricken the satirist dumb. These travelogues donot show Twain's gifts to greatest advantage. Flashes of notable writing occur,but intrinsically they are the potboilers of a master improviser.
4.2.The earliest novel he attempted was The Gilded Age, in collaborationwith Charles Dudley Warner, published late in 1873, just as the panic wasringing down the curtain upon the worst excesses of that age. It harks back totheir common knowledge of Missouri, where Warner had been a surveyor, and toTwain's passing observation of Washington in the winter of 1867-1868,[2]when after return from the Holy Land he had served briefly and unhappily asprivate secretary to pompous Senator William Stewart of Nevada and moresuccessfully had begun to write humorous commentaries on the news(antici-pative of the late Will Rogers) for the Tribune and the Herald of NewYork. This phase left him with an abiding scorn for politicians, theirintelligence and honesty. (»Fleas can be taught nearly anything that aCongressman can, is as characteristic as the remark that we have «nodistinctly native American criminal class except Congress.») Beside thebungling amateurs of Carso City, these were graduates in graft, scrambling forthe spoils of what a lat -(critic termed the Great Barbecue. Thissame spectacle of post-bellum Winton which sickened fastidious Henry Adams andled even Whitman to optimist to pen the darker pages of Democratic Vistas, gaveMark Twain his first shining target for satire.
Warner supplied conventional plot elements of romance, gentility, pluckand luck, harmonized with the theme of material success, which the noveldebunks at one level but praises fulsomely at another, when it is sanctioned bywhat passes among the majority as honesty. Twain himself was always dazzled bythe romance of fortune, especially if it followed the ascent from rags toriches, as he shows in a story like «The £1,000,000 Bank Note»(1893). Yet he was aware of the ironies and unhappiness springing from the rootof all evil, as revealed in «The $50,000 Bequest» (1904) and mostsuperbly in «The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg» (1899). In The GildedAge the authors' wavering purpose resembles a mixture of Jonathan Swift andHoratio Alger. Satiric punches are pulled by the constant impulse to strike outin all directions but follow through in none. The vulgarity of a chromocivilization and the urge to keep up with the Joneses mingle with churchlyhypocrisy, pork-barrel politics, high tariff, oratorical buncombe, abuse of thefranking privilege, bribery, personal immorality in high places, profiteers of «shoddy,»and the wider degradation of the democratic dogma.
The Gilded Age is clearly a world of optimistic illusion, proudly puttingits best foot forward though the other limp behind in a shabby mud-bespat­teredboot. In the backwoods, stagecoaches with horns blowing enter and leave town ata furious clip, but once out of sight «drag along stupidlyenough»—even as steamboats burn fat pine to make an impressive smoke whenthey near port. Credit is the basis of society; a typical parvenu boasts;«I wasn't worth a cent a year ago, and now I owe two millions ofdollars.» Most engaging specimen of this psychology is Colonel Sellers, aNew World Micawber, who deals in imaginary millions while he and the familydine off turnips and cold water (man's best diet, he loftily assures them), andwarm themselves at a stove through whose isinglass door flickers the illusoryglow of a candle. Drawn from Twain's Uncle James Lampton, the Colonel is anepitome of the American dream that remains a mirage—impulsive, generous, hospitable,and scheming to enrich not only himself but relatives and friends, andincidentally benefit all humankind, a colossal failure who basks forever in therush light of the success cult. Not dishonest by nature, in the heady milieu ofWashington he begins to apologize for bribery («a harsh term»), whilehitching his wagon to the baleful star of Senator Dilworthy, drawn roan thelineaments of Kansas' notorious Pomeroy. In certain passages Mark win’s ironyis whetted to a cutting edge, but the book's total effect is tar. In many waysboth authors were children of the Gilded Age, resuscitate him. The modestlaurels of a dramatic version of The Gilded Age, produced in 1874, led Twainand Howells to attempt in 1883 an hailer' sequel which, however, the stageSellers of the earlier script, John T, declined to play because that characterhad been exaggerated brink of lunacy. The plot, as embalmed in Twain's novel, TheAnieri Claimant (1892)[3], justifies the actor'sverdict. It is one of the humorist's m strained and least successful efforts.

5.2 Critical analysis of “Adventuresof Tom Sawyer”
Three years after The Gilded Age Twain published Tom Sawyer, the first ofthree great books about the Mississippi River of his youth. Beyond question, HuckleberryFinn (1885), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Tom Sawyer (1876) are, in thatorder, his finest works. The reasons for their supe­riority are not far toseek. In plotting a book his structural sense was always weak; intoxicated by ahunch, he seldom saw far ahead, and too many of his stories peter out from theauthor's fatigue or surfeit. His wayward technique as Howells recognized, came closeto free association:
So far as I know, Mr. Clemens is the first writer to use in extendedwriting the fashion we all use in thinking, and to set down the thing thatcomes into his mind without fear or favor of the thing that went before or thething that may be about to follow.
This method served him best after he had conjured up characters from longago, who on coming to life wrote the narrative for him, passing from incidentto incident with a grace their creator could never achieve in manipulating anartificial plot. In travel books and other autobiography written under the heatof recent experience, Mark Twain seemingly put in everything, mixing thetrivial, inane, and farcical with his best-grade ore. But in the remembrance ofthings past, time had dissolved the alloy, leaving only gold. The nostalgia fora youth's paradise «over the hills and far away,» for thefast-vanishing freedom of the West, appealed deeply to the age of boyhoodsentiment enriched by Longfellow and Whittier. It also led to Mark Twain'sstrength; namely, the world of the senses and physical action. What he felt wasalways better expressed than what he had thought or speculated about. A boy'sworld freed him from those economic and political perplexities, adult dilemmasand introspections, where in rages and knotty casuistries he lost the surenesso touch that came to him through the report of his five senses or through thechampionship of justice when the issue was as simple as the conflict betweenbullies and little folk.
Jan his heart Mark Twain must have realized that essentially he was a manfeeling, too sensitive to serve merely as a comedian, too undisciplined to philosopherhe sometimes fancied himself. His forte was to recapture «his sheer joy ofliving, when to be young was very heaven. A great river flowing through thewilderness set the stage for a boy's own dream of selfefficiency, of being anew Robinson Crusoe on Jackson's Island. In the background moved the pageantryof life, colored by humor, make-believe, and melodrama; but the complexity ofthe machine age and the city lay far, far away.
Mark Twain did not write his first books about this dream world, but let hehaze of ideality collect about it, reserving it luckily for the high noon ofhis powers. Apparently the first hint o£ this motif comes in one of hisNew ' York letters to the Alta California, in the spring of 1867, in which hehappens to recall the town drunkard of Hannibal, Jimmy Finn (destined to returnas Huck's father), and also the Cadets of Temperance which Sam Clemens joinedin order to march in funeral processions wearing their red scarf. This latterincident crops up in Tom Sawyer. Shortly afterward in The Innocents, among thepleasures and palaces of Europe, Twain interpolated other boyhood memories. InFebruary, 1870, on receiving a letter from his „first, and oldest anddearest friend“ Will Bowen, one of the flesh-and-blood components of TomSawyer, he sat down under the spell of the past and wrote a reply calling upsome eight scenes which later appear in Tom Sawyer and Hackle-berry Finn. Aroundthis time he wrote a nameless sketch about a romantic lovesick swain who beyondquestion is Tom Sawyer. Designated as „Boy's Manuscript“ by Twain'sfirst editor, Albert Bigelow Paine, it was not pub­lished until 1942 in BernardDe Veto's Mark Twain at Wolf. Some four years later Twain made a fresh start,scrapping the earlier diary form in favor of third-person narrative. Bymidsummer, 1875, it was done, and off the press late in the next year (a few monthsafter Clemens with his usual inconsistency had written Will Bowen a sternletter on August 31, 1876, bidding him dwell no more in the sentimentalnever-never land of boyhood, denying that the past holds anything „worthpickling for present or future use“). In this latter year Twain began HuckleberryFinn as a sequel, laid it aside during six years, went back to the story afterhis visit to Hannibal in 1882, and bushed it a little over two years later.
The first reader of Tom Sawyer, William Dean Howells, disagreed with theauthor that he had written a book for adults only. He quickly persuaded twainthat it was primarily a story for boys, which would gad over their shoulder.Twain therefore withdrew a few gibes against Sunday schools and turned several phrasesthat smacked of backwoods frank­ness. Nothing of importance, however, wasaltered, nor did Tom suffer from transformation into the neat, obedient paragonwhich fiction for the so long had held up to their resentful gaze. The firstchapter announces the Tom „was not the Model Boy of the village. He knewthe model boy well though — and loathed him.“ The only resemblance Tombears to t-K fictional creations of his time is in sensibility: he yields toself-pity relish every neighborhood tear shed over his supposed drowning, andalmost fail upon hearing that even a villain like Injun Joe has been sealed inthe ca Otherwise, our hero is of very different mettle. He steals from and AuntFolly luxuriates in idleness, missives in church, huffs and like his friendHuck employs lying as protective coloration in a world of adult tyrants.Consequently, in some American homes the new book was read by grown-ups, thentucked away out of a boy's reach; its successor Huckleberry Finn, soon afterpublication was ejected from the town library of Concord, Massachusetts (where,a generation before, John Brown had been welcomed by Thoreau and Emerson),because Huck elected to „go to Hell“ rather than betray his friend, arunaway Negro.
In 1870 Thomas Bailey Aldrich had published his mild Story of a Bad Boy;[4]twenty years later Twain's friend Hovels would reminisce of adolescents not toobright or good for human nature's daily food in A Boy's Town; a little latercame Stephen Crane's recollections of Whilom Ville and William Alien White's ofBayville. They helped maintain the tradition of realism. In extreme recoil frompriggishness, a line beginning with Peck's Bad Boy in 1883 flauntedincorrigibility above all. It is possible to overstress the picaresque intentof Tom Sawyer in turning upside down the world of Peter Parley and the Rollabooks, or its analogues with that still greater novel, Cervantes' Don Quixote, inwhich some critics find the model of Tom the dreamer and Huck his commonsensehenchman. Mark Twain's verisimilitude should not be overlooked in this searchfor „purpose.“ He wrote about boys from having been one in the GildedAge, in a river town before the war.
To a stranger in 1887 he described this book as „simply a hymn, putinto prose form to give it a worldly air.“ These lads no more resemblePeck's Bad Boy than they do the model children of that improving story-teller,Jacob Abbott. Within a framework of superb dialogue and setting, of sensitiveperceptions that turn now and again into poetry, against a background whereflicker shadows of adult humanitarianism and irony, Tom and Huck grow visiblyas we follow them. The pranks and make-believe of early chapters-whitewashingthe fence, releasing a pinch bug in church, playing pirate in Tom Sawyer, andin its sequel the rout of a Sunday school picnic under the guise of attacking adesert caravan — are dimmed as the human values deepen and occasional moralissues appear. The Tom who takes Becky's punishment in school, and testifiesfor the innocent Muff Potter at risk of the murderer revenge, parallels thedevelopment of Huck from a happy-golucky gamine epitome of generosity andloyalty.
6.2 “Huckleberry Finn” as the mostsignificant work
Mark Twain makes no account of consistencies in time. His boys varybetween the attitudes of nine-year-ids and those of thirteen or fourteen,despite the fact that Tom Sawyer 's time is one Missouri summer, and that of HuckleberryFinn a few more broken months. Like the creator of perennial comic-stripcharacters, Twain syncopates the march of time as he pleases. In the latternovel he also ignores the fact that Nigger Jim could have escaped by swimming acrossto the free soil of Illinois early in the book, and commits other sins against literalismwhich he would have ridiculed unmercifully in the pages of his noire James FennimoreCooper.
Huckleberry Finn is clearly the finer book, showing a more mature point of viewand exploring richer strata of human experience. A joy forever, it isunquestionably one of the masterpieces of American and of world literature. HereTwain returned to his first idea of having the chief actor tell the story, withbetter results. Huck's speech is saltier than Tom's, his mind freer from theclaptrap of romance and sophistication. Huck is poised midway between thetown-bred Tom and that scion of wood lore and primitive superstition NiggerJim, toward whom Huck with his margin of superior worldliness stands insomewhat the same relation that Tom stands toward Huck. When Tom and Huck aretogether, our sympathy turns invariably toward the latter. A homeless riverrat, cheerful in his rags, suspicious of every attempt to civilize him, Huckhas none of the unimportant virtues and all the essential ones. The school ofhard knocks has taught him skepticism, horse sense, and a tenacious grasp onreality. But it has not toughened him into cynicism or crime. Nature gave him astanch and faithful heart, friendly to all underdogs and instantly hostiletoward bullies and all shapes of overmastering power. One critic has called himthe type of the common folk, sample of the run-of-the-mill democracy inAmerica. Twain himself might have objected to the label, for him once declared»there are no common people, except m the highest spheres ofsociety." Huck always displays frontier neighborliness, even trying toprovide a rescue for three murderers dying marooned on a wrecked boat, because«there isn’t no telling but I might come to be a murderer myself, yet, andthen how would I like it?» Money does not tempt him to betray his friendNigger Jim, though at times his conscience is troubled by the voice ofconvention, preaching the sacredness of property — in the guise of flesh andblood — and he trembles on the brink of sur­render. Nor can he resist sometimesthe provocation offered by Jim's innocent sedulity, only to be cut to the quickwhen his friend bears with dignity the skivers that his trustfulness has beenmade game of. Even as Huck surpasses Tom in qualities of courage and heart, soNigger Jim excels even
Huck in fidelity and innate manliness, to emerge as the book's character.
Sam Clemens himself (who in the first known letter he wrote his on theday he reached New York in August, 1853,[5] had indulgedthe sarcasm, «I reckon I had better black my face, for in these EasternStat niggers are considerably better than white people») learned in time,much Huck learns, to face down his condescension. In later years he became warmfriend of the Negro and his rights. He paid the way of a near student throughYale as «his part of the reparation due from every white t every blackman,» and savagely attacked King Leopold of Belgium for the barbarities ofhis agents in the Congo. Mrs. Clemens once suggested as a mollifying rule toher husband, «Consider everybody colored till he is proved white.»Howells thought that as time went on Clemens the South westerner was prone tolose his Southern but cleave to his Western heritage, finding his realaffinities with the broader democracy of the frontier. On other issues of raceprejudice, Twain looked upon the Jew with unqualified admiration defended theChinese whom he had seen pelted through the streets of San Francisco, andconfessed to only one invincible antipathy, namely, against the French—althoughhis most rhapsodic book was written in praise of their national heroine.
The final draft of Huckleberry Finn was intimately bound up with thewriting of Twain's third great volume about his river days, Life on theMississippi. Fourteen chapters of these recollections had been published in theAtlantic in 1875; before expanding them into a book Twain made a memorable tripin 1882 back to the scenes of his youth. In working more or less simultaneouslyon both long-unfinished books, he lifted a scene intended for Huckleberry Finn—aboutHuck and the craftsmen—to flavor the other book, but the great gainer from histrip was not the memoir but the novel. The relative pallor of Life on theMississippi, Part II, is due in a measure to the fact that so much lifeblood ofreminiscence is drained off into the veins of Huckleberry Finn. The travelnotes of 1882, written up soon after Twain s return home, are suffused withsome of the finest situations in his novel: the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud,Colonel Sherborn and the mob, and the two seedy vagabonds who come on-stage asthe Duke and the King, with a posse in their wake, who «said they hadn'tbeen doing nothing, and was being chased for it.»
Mark Twain's renewed contact with life among the river towns quickenedhis sense of realism. For Huckleberry Finn, save in its passages about thepeace and freedom of Jackson's Island, is no longer «simply a hymn,»and so dim has grown the dream of adolescent romancing that Becky Tacticreappears but perfunctorily under the careless label of «Bessie»Thatcher essay Huck's voyage through the South reveals aspects of life darkerthan the occasional melodrama of Tom Sawyer. We are shown the and of poor whitejack woods loafers with their plug tobacco and Barlow dogs on stray sows and laughat the fun and look grateful for the noise," or drench a stray cur withturpentine and set him afire. We remark the cowardice of lynching «parties»the chicanery of patent medicine fakers, revivalists, and exploiters of rusticribaldry; the senseless feedings of he gentry. In the background broods fear:not only a boy's apprehension of -hosts, African superstitions, and the terrorsof the night, nor the adults' dread of black insurrection, but the endlessimplicated strands of robbery, floggings, drowning, and murder. Death byviolence lurks at every bend of road or river. Self-preservation becomes theruling motive, squaring perfectly with the role of the principal characters,Huck the foot-loose orphan and his friend Jim the fugitive—puny in allstrengths save loyalty, as they wander among the boots of white adultsupremacy. The pair belongs to the immortals of fiction.
«Never keen at self-criticism, Mark Twain passed without soundingsfrom these depths to the adjacent shallows of burlesque and extravaganza. Thelast fifth of this superb novel, Huckleberry Finn, brings back the romantic TomSawyer, with a hilarious, intricate, and needless plot for rescuing Jim fromcaptivity. The story thus closes upon the farcical note with which the Han­nibalcycle has begun, in the whitewashing episode. On the same note many years laterMark Twain tried to revive his most famous characters, in Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894),with Tom, Huck, and Jim as passengers of a mad balloonist and their subsequentadventures in Egypt. Though inferior to its great predecessors, this book doesnot lack humor, gusto, and rich character­ization. Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)[6]dishes up a melodrama of stolen dia­monds, double-crossing thieves, and thatimmortal device of Plaits and Shakespeare, identical twins, whose charm customcould not stale for Mark Twain. Here haste artifice, and creative fatigue grow painfullyapparent.
Uneven quality appears in even though it came at the high tide of hispowers. Chapters IV-XVII was written for the Atlantic after Twain's chancereminiscences led his friend twitchily to exclaim, „What a virgin subjectto hurl into a magazine!“ Fresh, vivid, humorous, they recall the greatdays of river traffic: the problems of navigation, the races, the pilots'association, the resourcefulness and glory of the old-time pilot. The addenda,which came after Twain's return to the river for „copy,“ sometimesattain the former standard—the description of Pilot Brown the scold, or theaccount of the Pennsylvania disaster and Henry Clemens' death—but more provedisappointing after the white heat of the book's inception. The two chapters onthe history of the river are merely an afterthought; the later ones too oftenwander among irrelevant yarns, like the revenge of the Austrian, or vignettesof picturesque New Orleans. Sam Clemens' and a half as cub pilot are followedby almost no mention of his two years as a licensed skipper. Instead we aretreated to such vagaries as Twain's famous theory about Sir Walter Scott, whose»Middle-Age sham civilization» he claimed, inspired the chivalry of theOld South, which in turn provoked the Civil War.
Yet with all its flaws of disunity and untidiness, Life on the remains amasterpiece. Its communicable delight in experience, its of the human comedy andtragedy on the river (which Melville alone among great artists had tried tobring into focus in The Confidence Man in 1857) lend it real durability.Howeils believed that the author long regarded it his greatest book — pleasedwith assurance to that effect from the German Kaiser and also from a hotelporter, whose praise he accepted with equal satisfaction. In other moods,toward the end of his life, Twain favored Joan of Arc, in part because it costhim «twelve years of preparation and two years of writing. The othersneeded no preparation, & got none.» Thus again he displayed theblindness of self-appraisal. The book that required probably least effort ofall, drawn from a brimming native reservoir, Huckleberry Finn, unquestionablyis his finest, with Tom Sawyer and Life on the Mississippi as runners-up.
7.2 Later years of Mark Twain
Mark Twain's later years show a drift toward the remote in time andplace, in a fitful quest for new themes, new magic—a search that proceededapace with a growing sense of personal dissatisfaction, frustration, andheartbreak. While the aging artist began to lose much of his creative fire,Clemens the generous, erratic, moody, and vulnerable human being remained,standing at bay against the disillusions and disasters that gathered to ringhim around and mock his fame as the world humorist of the century. Thedevelopment of this last phase is worth tracing.
From recollections of his Hannibal boyhood he gravitated toward a new butdistinctly artificial romanticism, «the pageant and fairy-tale» oflire 1° medieval Europe. His earliest treatment of the theme is, The Prince andthe Pauper (i88i),history mainly for children, built upon the oldplot to taffy. Here to a degree, and still more in Connecticut Yard in KingArthur's Court (1889) and Personal Recollections of Joan of An (1896), theromantic's fascination with knights and castles is counterbalance by theiconoclast's itch to shatter that world of sham and injustice, w crown andmiter lorded it over the commons. The savage indignation w Twain so loved tounleash found hunting that gratified him: the prey some resemblance to thecontemporary, without committing him to the consequences of a frontal attackupon modern authoritarianism, convention, and orthodoxy. A Connecticut Yankee, bestof the cycle, shows just such an ingenious mechanic as Clemens must often havemet on visits to the Hartford shops of Pratt & Whitney, a Yankee who isswept back in time to Camelot. With one hand he transforms Arthurian England intoa going concern of steam and electricity; with the other, seeks to plant theseeds of equalitarian-ism. He remarks that in feudal society six men out of athousand cracks the whip over their fellows' backs: «It seemed to me thatwhat the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal.» Thispassage, as the late President Roosevelt testified, furnished the mostmemorable phrase in modern American government. The Connecticut Yankee assertsthat the mass of a nation can always produce «the material in abundancewhereby to govern itself.» Yet the medieval mob is shown collectively tobe gullible, vicious, invincibly ignorant, like the populace of Hannibal orHartford, so that the Yankee sets up not a true democracy but a benigndictatorship centering in himself and his mechanical skills—a kind oftechnocrat's Utopia. Dazzled by the wonders of applied science, Mark Twainalways hoped for social as well as technological miracles from the dynamo.
Twain's apotheosis of the Virgin—in terms of Henry Adams' dilemma— ofspiritual forces in conflict with materialism and the stupid cruelty oforganized society, appears in Joan of Arc. The Maid was his favorite characterin history. But as Twain's imagination is better thankless knowledge ofmedieval life, the result at best is a tour de force.
Joan anonymously,in hope of giving this book a head start the-world had come synonymous withcomedy. Indeed, most people continued to hail with uproarious mirth MarkTwain's explosive attacks upon power politics, imperialism, malefactors ofgreat wealth, hypocrisy in morals and religion, and other manifestations ofwhat he increasingly came to call «the damned human race.» Theyrefused to forget «The Celebrated Jumping Frog,» or his reputationfor convulsing any crowd whenever his mouth was opened. Meanwhile, as thesatirist gained upper hand over the humorist in his nature, and age diminishedhis ebullience, Mark Twain not only earnest vainly for a serious nearing alsocame role of platform zany.
Lecturing, however, became a need more urgent than ever. For, beginningwith the Panic of 1893, the tide of Mark Twain's luck suddenly changed. Thefamous writer, with ample cash in hand and enviable royalties rolling in, stillvigorous in health and self-confidence, the adoring husband and beloved antherof three charming daughters—this self-made «jour» printer and river-Dustmanwhom the world delighted to honor—upon him fortune suddenly began to rain Thefirst losses were financial. The Paige typesetting machine, brain child of an erraticinventor who came close to anticipating the fabulous success of Merge talker’slinotype, failed after years of costly maintenance from Clemens1pocket; instead of making millions, he lost hundreds of thousands. Then thepublishing firm of Charles L. Webster (named for the son-in-law of Mark'ssister, but backed by the author himself through suspicion of the bigcommercial publishers) crashed into bankruptcy. Twain's new friend Henry H.Rogers, Standard Oil magnate and by the lights of the muckraking age a robberbaron, advised him that the ethics of literature were higher than those ofbusiness, and «you must earn the cent per cent.» Mark's ownconscience fully acquiesced. Even though his old exuberant energy was flagging,he set out in 1895 on a world lecture tour, after giving a statement to thepress:
The law recognizes no mortgage on a man's brain, and a merchant who hasgiven up all he has may take advantage of the laws of insolvency and start freeagain for himself. But I am not a business man, and honor is a harder masterthan the law. It cannot compromise for less than 100 cents on the cellular andits debts never outlaw.
The profits, together with royalties and the astute management of Mr.Rogers, eventually enabled him to pay the last dollar to these creditors andadd an American parallel to the case of Sir Walter Scott.
Twain's last notable book about American life, Muttonhead Wilson (1894),written on the brink of financial disaster but before the onset of deepertragedies, is about a nonconformist who is too witty and wise for the backwoodscommunity where his days are spent; miscalled «Muttonhead,» he atlast wins recognition by solving a murder mystery through his hobby offingerprints. In so doing he also unravels a case of transposed identities forwhich the Regress Proxy—a character of magnificent vigor and realism—had beenresponsible. The novel is a daring, though inconclusive, study ofmiscegenation. Significant of Mark Twain's growing pessimism are the cynicalchapter mottoes ascribed «Calendar,» such as: «If you pick up astarving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is theprincipal difference between a dog and a man.» Or, still more typical tothe aging Twain; «Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life » [7]knowshow deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great * factor of ourrace. He brought death into the world.»
These notes—the ingratitude and folly of man, the vanity of wishes, thepraise of death as the nepenthe for life's tragedy—echo increase kingly throughthe later writings of Mark Twain, This drift was no nature, but theaccentuation of a lifelong trend. In youth he had been object to fits ofmelancholy and disillusion. In Cincinnati at the age of twenty he had listenedavidly to a homespun philosopher expound the gospel of scientific determinism;as a cub pilot he read Tom Paine «with fear and hesitation.» Later,in San Francisco, Mark said he had come within a trigger's breadth of suicide,and in 1876 for obscure causes yielded to a bad season of the blues. Still laterhe discovered Jonathan Edwards, brooding for days over the«dominion of Motive and Necessity,» and was powerfully drawn to theagnosticism of Huxley, Haeckel, and Ingersoll. As a boy he had been terrorizedby the fickle and vindictive Jehovah of Sunday schools; as a youth he graduatedto the God of scientific law, impersonal but just; as an old man he returned tothe cruel God, now stripped of anthropomorphic whims, but no less terrible ascausation and fate. As early as 1882, in an unpublished dialogue between Negroeswritten on his river trip, Mark Twain sketched out the logic elaborated sixteenyears later in his «wicked book» What Is Man?—not printed until 1906,then privately and anonymously because boastingly incontrovertible. Itsargument, developed between an earnest Young Man and a cynical Old Man, is thatself-interest and self-approval are the mainsprings of human conduct, howevercleverly they mask themselves as honor, charity, altruism, or love. Hunger forself-esteem is the master passion; under this demon of the ego, free will isnothing but illusion.
While Mark was lecturing around the world for «honor,» newsreached him that back home his favorite daughter Suzy had suddenly succumbed tomeningitis. Would the girl have died if her parents had not deserted her? Itwas perhaps a foolish question, but natural to a self-accusing heart likeClemens'. Unpublished papers bear witness to his bitterness in those days,savage reflections about how God gives us breath and bodies only to undermineus with the million plagues of disease and heartbreak, to show what Twain callsHis «fatherly infatuation» toward us. Meanwhile Mrs. Clemens sankdeeper and deeper into a hopeless invalidism that ended only with the mercy ofher death in 1904; and their daughter Jean, whose moods had long puzzled them,was discovered to be an incurable epileptic. Mark Twain's own robust health wasbeginning to crumble, and—as a still more tragic circumstance to the artist whohad begun to use hard work as an anodyne for griffins magnificent creativepowers were now sadly on the wane. His unpublished papers are full offragmentary stories and novels that simply would not come out right, and wereendlessly reworked, rewritten, finally abandoned. Many e reminiscent,in plot and character, of his golden period; the magician fell upon his oldrepertory, made the same passes, but somehow failed to with personalrevelation. Twain in pet tormenting himself, in a dozen allegorical disguises,with the began to rain blow. The first losses were financial. The Paigetypesetting machine, brain child of an «erratic» inventor «whocame close to anticipating the fabulous success of linotype, failed after yearsof costly maintenance from Clemens' pocket; instead of making millions, he losthundreds of thousands. Then the publishing firm of Charles L. Webster (namedfor the son-in-law of Mark's sister, but backed by the author himself throughsuspicion of the big commercial publishers) crashed into bankruptcy. Twain'snew friend Henry H. Rogers, Standard Oil magnate and by the lights of themuckraking age a robber baron, advised him that the ethics of literature werehigher than those of business, and „you must earn the cent per cent.“Mark's own conscience fully acquiesced. Even though his old exuberant energywas flagging, he set out in 1895 on a world lecture tour, after giving astatement to the press:
The law recognizes no mortgage on a man's brain, and a merchant who hasgiven up all he has may take advantage of the laws of insolvency and start freeagain for himself. But I am not a business man, and honor is a harder masterthan the law. It cannot compromise for less than 100 cents on the dollar andits debts never outlaw.
The profits, together with royalties and the astute management of Mr.Rogers, eventually enabled him to pay the last dollar to these creditors andadd an American parallel to the case of Sir Walter Scott.
Twain's last notable book about American life, Wilson (1894), written onthe brink of financial disaster but before the onset of deeper tragedies, isabout a nonconformist who is too witty and wise for the backwoods communitywhere his days are spent; miscalled he at last wins recognition by solving amurder mystery through his hobby of fingerprints. In so doing he also unravelsa case of transposed identities for which the Negress Roxy—a character ofmagnificent vigor and realism—had been responsible. The novel is a daring,though inconclusive, study of miscegenation. Significant of Mark Twain'sgrowing pessimism are the cynical chapter mottoes ascribed to»Calendar," such as: «If you pick up a starving dog and make himprosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between adog and a man.» Or, still more typical pi the aging Twain: «Whoeverhas lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt ofgratitude we owe to Adam, the first great be*16' factor of our race.He brought death into the world.»
These notes—the ingratitude and folly of man, the vanity of hum wishes,the praise of death as the nepenthe for life's tragedy—echo increasinglythrough the later writings of Mark Twain. This drift was no A nurture, but theaccentuation of a lifelong trend. In youth he had been object to fits ofmelancholy and disillusion. In Cincinnati at the age of twenty listened avidlyto a homespun philosopher expound the gospel of determinism; as a cub pilot heread Tom Paine «with fear and hesitation.» in San Francisco, Marksaid he had come within a trigger's breadth of suicide, and in 1876 for obscurecauses yielded to a bad season of the blues. Still later he discovered JonathanEdwards, brooding for days over the «dominion of Motive andNecessity,» and was powerfully drawn to the agnosticism of Huxley, Hackle,and Innersole. As a boy he had been terror­ized by the fickle and vindictiveJehovah of Sunday schools; as a youth he graduated to the God of scientificlaw, impersonal but just; as an old man he returned to the cruel God, nowstripped of anthropomorphic whims, but no less terrible as causation and fate.As early as 1882, in an unpublished dialogue between Negroes written on hisriver trip, Mark Twain sketched out the logic elaborated sixteen years later inhis «wicked book» What Is Man? — not printed until 1906, thenprivately and anonymously because boastingly incontrovertible. Its argument,developed between an earnest Young Man and a cynical Old Man, is thatself-interest and self-approval are the mainsprings of human conduct, howevercleverly they mask themselves as honor, charity, altruism, or love. Hunger forself-esteem is the master passion; under this demon of the ego, free will isnothing but illusion.
While Mark was lecturing around the world for «honor,» newsreached him that back home his favorite daughter Suzy had suddenly succumbed tomeningitis. Would the girl have died if her parents had not deserted her? Itwas perhaps a foolish question, but natural to a self-accusing heart likeClemens'. Unpublished papers bear witness to his bitterness in those days,savage reflections about how God gives us breath and bodies only to undermineus with the million plagues of disease and heartbreak, to show what Twain callsHis «fatherly infatuation» toward us. Meanwhile Mrs. Clemens sankdeeper and deeper into a hopeless invalidism that ended only with the mercy ofher death in 1904[8]; and their daughter Jean,whose moods had long puzzled them, was discovered to be an incurable epileptic.Mark Twain's own robust health was beginning to crumble, and — as a still moretragic circumstance to the artist who had begun to use hard work as an anodynefor grief — is magnificent creative powers were now sadly on the wane. Hisunpublished papers are full of fragmentary stories and novels that simply wouldnot come, and were endlessly reworked, rewritten, finally abandoned. Many rereminiscent, in plot and character, of his golden period; the magician fellupon his old repertory, made the same passes, but somehow failed to quant withpersonal revelation. Twain in kept tormenting him, in a dozen allegoricaldisguises, with the problem of «guilt» which (as his Calvinistconscience whispered) must somehow be antecedent to punishment, the cause ofall the failures and bereavements fate had inflicted upon him. The artist keepsasking himself: Was I to blame, for something I did or left undone? The motifof a doting father with a dead or missing child is frequent, and of coursetransparent.
One such story concerns the dream of a man who has fallen asleep aftergazing at a drop of water, swimming with animalcule, beneath the micro­scope.He dreams that he is on shipboard in the Antarctic seas pursuing his lost childwho has been carried off by another ship, in a chase that continues like somenightmare in a fever, while terrible creatures arise to roam the deep andsnatch passengers off the deck. The captain of the ship is called theSuperintendent of Dreams, and it is his cunning to destroy the seafarers' senseof reality, while they circle toward the ultimate horror of the Great WhiteGlare —actually the beam cast through the microscope's field by the reflector—avortex of death into which all things, including the craft with the missingchild, are being drawn. Seldom has determinism found a grimmer symbol.
The greatest story of Mark Twain's later period, too often neglected inthe appraisal to his work, wins at last the personal answer for which he soughtso desperately. In the light of those unfinished manuscripts among the MarkTwain Papers, it attains true perspective. This is The Mysterious Stranger, begunin the gloom of 1898 after Susy's death and Jean's hopeless prognosis, but notfinished until several years later and published post- Like the last act of aGreek tragedy, or Samson Agonistes with «all passion spent,» itachieves a wintry serenity beyond despair. The story is that of _some boys whoare really Tom Sawyer's gang in medieval dress, in the Austrian village of Eelworm,who strike up acquaintance with a supernatural visitor able to work miraclesand juggle with lives. Calling him­self «Satan,» he claimsrelationship with the prince of fallen angels, but appears to live in a spherebeyond both good and evil. Laughter and tears, joy and torment, saintliness andsin, to him are but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and at last he growsbored with his own wonder-working caprices. He then tells the wide-eyed Theodora.
It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, nouniverse, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all adream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—avagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn amongthe empty eternities!
And in his heart of hearts the boy knows this is true. Here, in theclosing pages of The Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain solved his riddle of grief,and clothed his soul in the only invulnerable armor of despera­tion. Good andevil, like reality itself, are only illusions, such stuff as dreams are madeon, and our little life is rounded with the best gift of the Artist who savesit to the last—extinction…
Like Hailey’s comet in 1835 and 1910, whose appearance MarkTwain saw as setting the beginning and the end of his life, the luster of hisgenius flashed forth now and again against this darkened sky of fatalism. Hewrote and spoke with sparkles of his old wit, and few were aware of theencircling. Oxford gave him her degree of Doctor of Letters in 1907, and hisbirthdays became national events. In his famous white clothes he seemed a kindof ghost from America's buried life, recalling the nostalgia of her youth,revisiting these glimpses of the modern city and its vast industrialism. Buthis great creative genius had almost gone—that energy which he spent andsquandered so freely, when he had it, with the recklessness of the Old West.For Mark Twain the artist had always been a kind of pocket miner, stumblinglike fortune's darling upon native ore of incredible richness and exploiting itwith effortless skill—but often gleefully mistaking fool's gold for the genuinearticle, or lavishing his strength upon historical diggings long since playedout. If latterly he seemed to deny his role as America's great comic spirit,perhaps the key can be found in his last travel book: «Everything human ispathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is nohumor in heaven.»
8.2 Simpletons abroad (Americanliterature abroad)
England had welcomed the American writers of the classical period, andcontinued to read them for some time after they had begun to be neglected bythe American public. In a middle-class English home about the year 1900,Emerson would stand on the shelves next to Carlyle, Longfellow next to Tennyson(with signs of being more frequently read) and Lowell next to Matthew Arnold.The new generation rejected them all, the Bostonians along with the nativeVictorians. To the younger English intellectuals of the time, the only transatlanticauthors worth reading, except Whitman and Thoreau, were the new socialrealists, from Garland through Norris to Upton Sinclair. Dreiser's SisterCarrie was a critical success in London, when published there in 1901, althoughit had been arousing such a bitterly quiet condemnation in New York that theauthor—till then a successful journalist—found that his articles were«being rejected by all the magazines.
The English were usually hospitable to American writers as persons, oftenmore hospitable than they were to imported books. During there was a largeAmerican literary colony in what was still called the mother country: itincluded the aging Bret Hart, Henry James, Harold Frederic, Pearl from Boston(who wrote under the name John Oliver Hobbes), Howard Sturgis (author of thefine but neglected Belchamber), Henry Harland (who founded and edited the YellowBooty, and, for his last two years, Stephen Crane. Most of these authors had amore appreciative public in England than in the United States; for example,Bret Hare’s new books continued to be read in their English editions long aftermost Americans had forgotten that he was still a living author. Stephen Crane,who could not complain of being neglected at home, could justly complain ofbeing pursued there by scandals that the English found beneath their notice.Henry James, with no larger audience in London than in New York, at least foundmore of the happy few to understand his work. The same hospitality in lateryears would be shown to Ezra Pound, Conrad Aiken, Hilda Doolittle (»H.D."), and T. S. Eliot, the last of who became a British subject in 1927,like James in 1915[9].
At the turn of the century, some of the larger American magazines wereprinting English editions; that of Harper's was edited by Andrew Lang and had aBritish circulation of 100,000. Many American books crossed the Atlan­tic. Inthe October, 1904, issue of World's Work, Chalmers Roberts broadly assertedthat ten American books were being published in England where one had beenpublished twenty years before. He was not surprised by the fondness of theEnglish public for the genteel writings of James Lane Alien, a phenomenonremarked upon by many critics. What amazed him was the English success ofAmerican rural novels like David Harum, Eben Holden, and Mrs. Wigs of theCabbage Patch, all of which he described as being «intensely foreign andfull of detail quite unintelligible to the average Briton.»
Shortly after 1910, however, the British public showed signs of losing in­terestin American fiction, except for commodities like the works of Zane Grey andEdgar Rice Burroughs (who afterward claimed that the globe-girdling adventuresof Tarzan had been translated into fifty-six languages). American magazinesdiscontinued their London editions. As for the serious American novelists,English critics learned to say that they were ten or twenty or fifty yearsbehind the times. A few critics, however, had begun to discover the newAmerican poets—Robinson, Masters, Sandburg, Lindsay— sometimes before they wereknown in the United States; for example, Robert Frost had his first two bookspublished in London.
There were new American novelists, too, but they had few English readersduring the First World War; one of its effects was to keep the two countriesapart intellectually, even after they became allies. In 1920 the Englishpublisher of Main Street was so little impressed by Sinclair Lewis' Americansuccess that he began by merely importing a few hundred sets of printer'ssheets; it was not until later that he had the novel printed in England. MainStreet was never popular there, although it was more generally liked in Australia,which, more than New Zealand makes its own choice of American books. Babbitt, however,was the English best seller of 1922; and when its author next visited London hewas received like the general of an Allied army. «England,» Lewistold his hosts, with his redheaded gift for speaking his mind, «can nolonger be the mother country to American lit­erature, any more than she can bethe mother country to American politics or American life.» The Englishlistened, protested, argued with one another, and came to believe that Lewiswas right.
Babbitt wasthe beginning of a new era, during which American books were not only read butimitated. On their different literary levels, Heming­way, Edmund Wilson, JamesThurber, Damon Runyon, and Dash ell Ham-met each had English disciples, whosometimes improved on their various models. Graham Greene, for example, wroteEnglish gangster novels that had a psychological depth lacking in his Americanprecursors, except Hem­ingway. A younger Englishman, Peter Cheney, stuck to hismodels closely, so much so that one of his stories was included (1945) in aFrench anthology of the new American writing. The editor had learned of Cheney’snational­ity before the volume went to press, but had kept him with the othersbecause of his American style. By this time, however, styles and influenceswere flying back and forth across the Atlantic; and the English imitators ofthe American hard-boiled novelists—Graham Greene especially—were findingAmerican imitators in their turn. Among poets the transatlantic relations wereeven closer. T. S. Eliot was the strongest early influence on the new Englishpoets of the thirties such as Auden (before he came to live in the States),Spender, and Manlike; while Auden in turn set the tone for American poets inthe forties.
The American vogue continued year after year. In 1938 an Englishpublisher reported that all the novels since Babbitt with a sale of more than100,000 copies in England had been of American origin. American maga­zines werealso read: especially Time (which had two English imitations), the ReadersDigest (with an English edition), and the New Yorker, which, in the brightercircles, was quoted more often than Punch. In 1942 one-quarter of the new tradebooks listed in English publishers' catalogues had been written in the States.By 1946, however, the percentage of transatlantic imports was beginning todecline.
In France it was still growing. Not only were the French translating orplanning to translate dozens of the more prominent American novelists and theplays of Eugene O'Neill; they were also discovering and publishing, in themidst of a paper shortage, American books that had been largely neglected athome; for example, the fantastic Miss Lonely hearts, by Nathanael West, whichhad been published here in 1933 and had promptly gone out of print. At the sametime they showed a renewed interest in the American classics. The first Frenchtranslation of Moby appeared during the German occupation, together with asomewhat fictionalized biography of Melville by Jean Giono; and a translationof The Scarlet Letter was published in 1946.
The French had read most of the American classical authors when theyfirst appeared, but had forgotten them sooner than the English. There were afew striking exceptions: notably Cooper and Poe, who were carried over bodilyinto French literature and remain an integral part of it. Among the Americanswriting at the turn of the century, Henry James had a few care­ful Frenchreaders, and exercised a still undetermined influence on Marcel Proust. JackLondon had a wider public; he inherited the French popularity of Bret Harte..Edith Wharton, who lived in France, had most of her books translated; theywere praised in the terms that are usually applied to estimable but unexcitingFrench novels. Most of the other living American writers were little known evenin Paris; and their country was regarded, in general, as the literary home ofcowboys, miners, trappers, and the inimitable Nick Carter, whose weeklyadventures were then appearing in France, as in fifteen other foreigncountries.
The First World War, which tended to separate us intellectually from theEnglish, thus marking the end of what might be called the second colonialperiod in American letters, was an occasion for renewing old literary ties withthe French. Much has been written about the flight of American writers to Parisduring the twenties; it is not so generally known that there was a smaller butinfluential movement of French writers and scholars in the opposite direction.The migration began under French government auspices, with professors from theSorbonne encouraged to make American tours and lecture at Americanuniversities. They were shortly followed by a selected group of Frenchpostgraduate students, some of whom carried home with them a wide knowledge ofAmerican authors. Chairs of American Civilization and Literature were foundedat several of the French universities: at Paris (where Charles Cestre was theincumbent), Grenoble, Lille, Aix-Marseille, and elsewhere. French studentsworking in the field produced what is probably the largest group of scholarlystudies of American literature that exists in any foreign language.
But interest in American culture was also growing in a quite differentcircle, that of the younger avant-garde writers. Finding not much hope inEurope after the war, they were looking for new material, new ideas, and newways of life. A sort of romantic Americanism became the vogue among them after1920: they were connoisseurs of American films, especially Westerns, they readthe advertisements in the Saturday Evening Post, they dreamed of living in aNew York skyscraper (though few of them, in life, got beyond making a singlebrief voyage), and they even dressed in what they thought was the Americanfashion, wearing belts instead of suspenders and shaving their upper lips;whereas the young Americans who were running off to France in those years wereconnoisseurs of French books and French wines and liked to wear little Frenchmustaches. These were superficial signs on both sides, but they were anindication of tastes that proved to be lasting. The young American writers weredeeply influenced by French literature in the Symbolist tradition; the youngFrench writers were looking for American books that would express thepicturesque qualities they found in American life; and when the books began toappear in translation, after 1930, they seized upon them enthusiastically.
The Index Translationum, published for eight years by the Institute ofIntellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, lists the titles and authorsof all the books translated into the major European languages between 1932 and1940. During that period there were 332 French translations of American booksin the field of general literature. Jack London stands at the head of the listwith twenty-seven titles, and James Oliver Cur wood follows with twenty; boththese adventure-story writers were old favorites with the French public,although their day was passing. Sinclair Lewis and Edgar Allan Foe havefourteen titles each; Ellery Queen has ten detective stories; Pearl Buck hasnine of her books; Edgar Rice Burroughs, Louis Bromfield, and Henry James allhave seven. Farther down the list are the new authors that the youngergeneration was reading: William Faulkner with five titles, Ernest Hemingway andDashiell Hammett with four, John Dos Passes and Erskine Caldwell with three.None of these last reached the broadest French public, but all of them had whatLewis and Bromfield and Pearl Buck failed to achieve, that is, a directinfluence on the style and content of the new French writing.
Faulkner, comparatively little known at home, had gained an amazinglydeep and lasting French reputation. Andre Gide called him «one of the mostimportant, perhaps the most important, of the stars in this new constellation»;and Jean-Paul Sartre was more extreme in his praise: «For young writers inFrance,» he said in 1945, «Faulkner is a god.» Many Frenchcritics were disturbed by what seemed to them the completely foreign quality ofthe new American novelists. The newspaper man in Gide's Imaginary Interviews says:
I grant you Hemingway, since he is the most European of them all. As forthe others, I have to confess that their strangeness appalls me. I thought Iwould go mad with pain and horror when I read Faulkner's Sanctuary and his Lightin August. Dos Passos makes me suffocate. I laugh, it is true, when readingCaldwell's Journeyman or God's Little Acre, but I laugh on the wrong side of mymouth… If one believes what they are saying, the American cities and countrysides must offer a foretaste of hell.
But if one believes what Flaubert said a hundred years ago French citiesalso must have been an abode of the damned. All these American novelists,except possibly Caldwell, were students of Flaubert; they had been applyingmethods learned from him to American materials. Now their books were beingstudied in turn by Flaubert's countrymen.
Most of the other European countries followed either the French or theBritish pattern in their choice of American books. A novel that was a bestseller in England, like Kenneth Roberts' Northwest Passage, would also be abest seller in Germany and Scandinavia. An author admired by the French for hisintensity or his technical discoveries would also be admired by other Latinnations. Almost everywhere there was a lack of interest in American literatureduring the years after 1000 and a birth or rebirth of interest at some momentafter 1920. This new interest appeared earlier in the northern countries,because they liked Dreiser and Lewis, and later in the Latin countries, whichshowed more interest in younger writers like Hemingway and Faulkner. Therewere, however, national variations in the two general patterns; and in Russiaafter the Revolution the variations were so wide as to form a new pattern oftheir own.
Germany between 1890 and 1945 was another special case that has to beconsidered in some detail. In the Kaiser's Germany, Mark Twain had been by farthe most popular American author; there were exactly 100 translations of his variousworks between 1890 and 1913. After him came Anna Katharine Green, the earlydetective-story writer, with eighty-one translations; then Bret Harte, FrancesHodgson Burnett, F. Marion Crawford, and Lew Wallace, the author of Ben-Hur. Morethan half the novels of American origin translated into German during thetwenty-four years before the First World War were the work of these sixwriters. The most admired American poet was Walt Whitman, although his greatestpopularity would come later, during the early years of the Weimar Republic.Emerson was the favorite American essayist.
After the war, the Germans were eager for books that dealt with Americanindustry, the power by which they felt they had been defeated and especiallyeager for anything that dealt with Henry Ford. What they looked for in Americanbooks was information first of all, but they were better pleased if theinformation was presented critically; therefore they joked Theodore Dreiser(who was for several years the most popular American libraries), SinclairLewis, Upton Sinclair, and, in general, all the critical realists. Hemingwaywas admired by the younger German writers who would later go into exile, butmost of them were puzzled by his habit of understatement. When a Germannovelist wants to convey sadness or mild regret, he is likely to say that hewas overwhelmed by waves of intolerable grief. When Hemingway wants to implythat his hero was overwhelmed by waves of intolerable grief, as at the end of AFarewell to Arms, he says that he «walked back to the hotel in therain»; and the Germans did not know what to make of it. Thomas Wolfe, whonever used a little word when he could find three big ones, was an author moreto their taste. Loofy Homeward, Angel appealed to young people of all politicalfaiths, before and after Hitler's coming to power. There were good as well assinister qualities in the German youth movement, and some of the better oneswere mirrored at a distance in Wolfe's hero.
The strength of the Socialist and Communist parties under the WeimarRepublic helped to create a public for American authors with radical sym patties:not only for Upton Sinclair and Jack_Lqndon, but also for John Dos Passos,whose books at one time had a larger circulation in Germany than in the UnitedStates. Another writer admired by the German radicals was Agnes Smedley, whoseautobiography, Daughter of Earth, is comparatively little known in her owncountry, although it has been translated into fourteen languages. In Germany,where it was called Eine Frau Allein, it was especially popular among womenseeking courage to lead independent lives.
Miss Smedley's various books on the Chinese Revolution were also widely readuntil 1933, when they were all withdrawn from circulation. It was the same withDreiser Sinclair, Dos Passos, and Hemingway, none of whose works appeared in Germanybetween 10,33 and 1946; they were the best known of the many American authorswho suffered from Hitler's burning continued to be published in spite of hishaving written the anti-Nazi It Can't Happen Here. The Index Translationum showsthat five of his novels were translated into German between 1932 and 1940.There were eight translations of Pearl Buck during the same period, more thanof any other serious American author; perhaps her work was thought to bepolitically harmless because it dealt with China and, unlike Agnes Smedley's,made no plea for the Chinese Communists. Very few American books were publishedin Hitler's Germany if they dealt with contemporary Europe or America in anythoughtful fashion, no matter whether their authors were radical orconservative. The German public was still curious about our literature, but wasoffered, in general, only romance, adventure, mystery, and sentiment.
The Index Translationum lists 297 German translations from Americanoriginals in the field of general literature, a figure not far from the Frenchtotal of 332. There is, however, a difference in quality. Nearly half the Germanlist consists of Westerns and detective stories, with Max Brand, a masspurveyor of cowboy fiction, standing at the head of it with twenty-six titles.Historical romances were popular as an escape from daily life under adictatorship: Anthony Adverse, 'Northwest Passage, and especially Gone with theWind, which by 1941 had achieved the huge German sale of 360,693 copies; then it,disappeared from the bookstores with the demand for it still unsatisfied. Grapesof Wrath was circulated with official approval after Pearl Harbor, presumablyon the ground that its picture of the Okies would serve as anti-Americanpropaganda. Instead, what it proved to most of its readers was that Americanpeasants at their most destitute could travel about the country in automobiles,and that American writers were free to speak their minds in epical novels, at atime when German literature was being stifled. American books were readhungrily after the war ended, although few were available. Daughter of Earth wasrepublished and even serialized in a Berlin newspaper; Thorn ton Welder’s The Sinof Our Teeth was the hit of the German theaters.
In Sweden, and the other Scandinavian countries, there was not muchinterest in American literature before the middle twenties, although there wasgreat interest in a few American writers. Mark Twain in particular enjoyed thesame popularity as in Germany. The chief librarian of the Royal SwedishLibrary, Mr. O. H. Wieselgren, said in a letter that he was given the Swedishtranslation of Huckleberry Finn as a birthday present when he was ten yearsold.
I read the book [he continued] so that I learned It by heart. The Jungle,by Upton Sinclair, was translated in 1906. Sinclair since that time has beenvery widely read, and his social views have a great importance for the workingclass in our country. The Harbor, by Ernest Poole, was translated in 1915 andmet with great interest. But the most admired of all American authors in Swedenhas been and is still Jack London. His first books carne in translation in1909-10, and since that time he has appeared in innumerable editions. In publiclibraries he is still the most sought-for American author.
Interest in American literature, as opposed to interest in particularwriters, began with the visit to the United States of the influential critic G.Ruben Berg. On his return to Sweden in 1925, he published Modern Americana, inwhich he gave an account of the new authors who had appeared since 1910, withmuch space devoted to Sinclair Lewis. Most of the authors he mentioned weretranslated into Swedish during the years that, and in 1930 first American. Towin the Nobel Prize for literature, which is awarded by the Swedish Academy.Eugene O'Neill was the second, in 1936; he had always acknowledged his debt to beeven more popular in Strindberg's country than in the rest of Europe. PearlBuck, who won the prize in 1938, was also particularly liked in Sweden. Ten ofher books appeared there between 1932 and 1940, more than were translated fromany other American author during the years covered by the Index Translationum. Inall, the Index lists 213 American books in the field of general literature thatwere published in Sweden: a curious selection from new and half-forgottenauthors, with Louisa May Alcott rubbing elbows with Dashiell Hammett. «The'hard-boiled' literature plays an important role for our younger authors,»Mr. Wieselgren notes. «I think no literature has during the last decadebeen more important and more read here than the American.»
The last statement would also apply to Norway and Denmark. In the lattercountry, Pearl Buck was the most popular American author from 1932 to 1939 bestsellers like Anthony Adverse and Gone with the Wind), but way and her by 1940.Holland, however, was in a different situation. Sheltered from transatlanticwinds by the British Isles, it received most of its American books indirectly,after they had first become popular in London. In general it made nodistinction between British and American literature.
Under Mussolini the Italian censorship was in theory not very strict; theonly two American novelists whose works are known to have been forbidden wereHemingway (after his description of the Italian retreat in A Farewell to Arms) andwere removed by decree from public libraries. Still, the whole effect ofFascist policy was to discourage, in a quiet way, the translation of authorsfrom the democratic countries. The Italian public heard little about the newAmerican literature and, like the Dutch public, it made no sharp distinctionbetween American books and English books—usually preferring the latter, just asit preferred French books to either. Even after the liberation, when theItalians set to work translating the foreign works they had missed for theprevious twenty years, there were not many American authors in the earlypublishers' lists (Steinbeck, Vincent Sheena, Kenneth Roberts); more attentionwas paid to the new French and English poets and the classical Russiannovelists.
In Spain, American books and American movies had a brief vogue under theRepublic. There was a time when the younger Spanish poets, probably influencedby their French colleagues, wrote nostalgically about gangsters and skyscrapersand in some cases made pilgrimages to New York; that was also the time when thenews stands in Barcelona and Madrid were full of American magazines; but thevogue ended with the civil war. American books were suspect in Franco's Spain;even Gone with the Wind was not published there until 1943.
But Gone with the Wind, which eventually appeared in all the otherEuropean countries and was read by both sides during the early years of theSecond World War, was never published in Soviet Russia. In their choice ofAmerican books for translation, the Russians followed a pattern of their own,one that began to be discernible even before their Revolution. From thebeginning they liked American books if they were realistic or humorous orheroic in treatment, if they were democratic in sentiment, if they dealt withlife in a great city or, still better, with adventures on the frontier, and ifthe characters were representative of the American masses. Cooper was the firstAmerican author to win lasting favor in Russia; then came Harriet BeecherStowe; then Bret Hatred and Mark Twain; and then, in 1910, Jack London, whosepopularity increased when he was universally regarded as a socialist writerafter the 1917 Revolution—he was the author whom Krupskaya, Lenin's widow, readto her husband on his deathbed.
After 1918 there was a State Publishing House in Russia; but there werealso commercial publishers until 1928, and they competed for books by Americanwriters. Of these Jack London was still the most widely read: from 1918 to 1929there were six editions of his collected works in twelve to thirty-volume sets?Upton Sinclair was almost at popular, his books being regarded as a mine ofinformation about capitalistic society. There was such a scramble for the rightto publish them that Lunacharsky, the People's Commissar of Education, put anend to it in 1925 by officially designating Sinclair as a Soviet classic, thusputting him on the same pinnacle as Tolstoy and Pushkin, and, incidentally,vesting the Russian copyright to his books in the State Publishing House.
O. Henry was another favorite, not only with the masses but also withmany of the Soviet writers, who studied him for his technique (so that storieswith an O. Henry twist were being published in Russia at a time when Americanshort-story writers were imitating Chekhov). James Oliver Cur-wood was enoughlike London in his themes and settings to be liked for the same reasons; therewere forty-two editions of his separate novels between 1925 and 1927. OtherAmerican authors published at about the same time were Sherwood Anderson (studiedby serious Russian writers), Sinclair Lewis^ Booth Tarkington (Penrod), EdnaFerber (So Big and Rex Beach, and Zane Grey. During all period' the generalpopularity? American books continued to increase. In six months of 1912, therehad been seven American authors published in Russia as against twenty-twoEnglish authors; in six months of 1928, there were forty-two Americans andthirty-seven Englishmen.
In 1928, at the beginning of the first Five Year Plan, the state tookover the whole Russian publishing trade. There was a change in the character ofthe books selected for translation: Rex Beach, Zane Grey, and other popularentertainers disappeared from the lists of the state-controlled publishinghouses. In their place came several proletarian novelists of the Americandepression years: Michael Gold, Jack Conroy, Albert Halper, all of whom reacheda Russian audience several times as large as their audience at home. A completeedition of Dreiser's works was published in 1930; it was called the literaryevent of the year. Dos Passes was the most widely read American author, inliterary circles, from 1932 to 1934; at one time the Organization Committee ofSoviet Writers conducted a formal discussion of his work that lasted for threeheated and dialectical evenings. From 1935 to 1939 or later, Hemingway occupieda similar position; he too wistful subject of an or­ganized discussion bySoviet writers, and his technical influence on them seems to have been moreextensive and more lasting than that of Dos Passos (whose books, incidentally,continued to be published in Russia in spite of the strongly anti-Communistposition which he took after 1935).
Hemingway was translated in full; and all his books reached a wideaudience except For Whom the Bell Tolls, which had been set in type when thepublishers became worried by a long passage attacking Andre Marty by name.Marty, the French Communist«was at that time a refugee in Russia, and apublishing house controlled by the state did not like to be put in the positionof endorsing what it regarded as a slander against him. The result was that thevolume never went to press, although the proof sheets were read attentively bymost of the writers in Moscow. Erskine Caldwell and John Steinbeck are twoother widely translated Americans whom the Russian writers admired. At the sametime both men reached the general public, which also liked Pearl Buck, RichardWright's Native Son, and, during the war years, John Hersey's A Bell for Adano.
Control of the publishing industry by the Soviet state kept many booksout of Russia and promises to keep out many others during the postwar years ofinternational tension. It also led to the translation of books with morepolitical than commercial appeal; but apparently it had no deep effect on theliterary preferences of the Russian people. They continued to like the Americanauthors whom they liked from the beginning; and in general the state-controlledpublishers supplied them with the books they demanded. The Russians are fond ofexact figures: when they say that Jack London has been» the most popularof all American authors in the Soviet Union, they support the statement by. Addingthat his various books have been printed in 567 Russian editions, of which10,367,000 copies were sold between 1918 and 1943. Mark Twain comes after himat a distance, with 3,100,000 copies sold during the same period, and UptonSinclair comes third, with 2,700,000. In the twenty-five years that followedthe Russian Revolution, there were 217 Ameri­can authors translated intoRussian—again the exact figure, furnished by the State Publishing House—and thetotal sale of their translated books was 36,788,900 copies.
There were not so many of our authors published in Latin America and,until the Second World War, their appearance were subject to long delays.
They had to make a double voyage across the Atlantic before reachingArgentina or Brazil; they traveled by way of Paris, and few of their books wereadmitted without a French visa of critical or popular approval. As in France,some of our Western and Northwestern story writers found a public easily: RexBeach, James Oliver Curwood, Zane Grey. But the only serious North Americanauthor who exercised a direct influence in America Hispana during the twentieswas Waldo Frank. He lectured in all the capitals from Mexico City to BuenosAires, he spoke a fluent literary Spanish, and he attacked Yankee imperialismwhile defending—and introducing to a sym­pathetic audience—the rebel Americanwriters.
Early in 1941, a student of inter-American affairs went through acollection of the catalogues issued by Spanish-language publishers, almost allof whom have their headquarters in Santiago de Chile, Buenos Aires, or MexicoCity. He found that they listed seven translations from Waldo Frank, more thanfrom any other living North American writer. There were five translations fromSinclair Lewis, four from Steinbeck, and two each from Dos Passos and UptonSinclair (though Sinclair had seven other books issued by smaller, chieflysocialistic, publishers who printed no catalogues); also the student foundtranslations of best-selling novels like The Good Earth, The Bridge of San LuisRey, A Farewell to Arms, and Gone with the Wind— in all, forty-three volumesfrom our current literature, exclusive of technical works, Westerns, anddetective stories. He would have found many more North American books if he hadexamined the lists of the same publishers five years later, for there were anew interest in our literature after Pearl Harbor.
In part this interest resulted from the wartime activities of the Officeof Inter-American Affairs, which sent several of our writers on lecture toursof South America and subsidized the publication of North American books thatwould not otherwise have appeared by paying for their translation into Spanishand Portuguese. Most of the books it subsidized were technical or historical;but the Office of Inter-American Affairs also arranged for the publication inSpanish of a two-volume anthology of contemporary North American writing,carefully edited by John Peale Bishop and Alien Tate, There would have been agrowing interest in our literature without such encouragement, for the LatinAmericans were excited by our entrance into the war, they were receiving veryfew books from Europe, and they were hearing from many unofficial sources aboutthe younger North American novelists and poets. Hemingway, Steinbeck,KatherineAnne Porter, and Crane were among those and Brazilian intellectuals.
It is hard to gather accurate information about American literature in theOrient, where, generally speaking, the laws of international copyright are notenforced. In Japan before the Second World War, they did not even exist, asregards American books: a treaty negotiated under the first Roosevelt gave theJapanese permission to translate any American work without notifying theauthor. Not even squatter's right was recognized, and there was nothing toprevent five Japanese publishers from presenting five differently garbledtranslations of the same novel, as happened in the case of Gone with the Wind. Ofthree Japanese versions of Whitman, who had a large following, only one is saidto have had any literary merit. Poe also—his fiction rather than his verse—wasinaccurately rendered and widely read.
After 1930 the ruling clique in Japan tried hard to discourage«decadent» American influences, including the new American fiction;but Japanese publishers kept racing to press with competing versions ofAmerican best sellers. Main Street was a success in Japan; so too was PearlBuck's The Good Earth, which was followed by translations of her later books(even those like The Patriot in which she condemned the Japanese invasion ofChina); while Gone with the Wind was the greatest success of all, having a salein its various translations of more than half a million copies. At leasttwenty-four books by Upton Sinclair were translated into Japanese. Acorrespondent told him in 1931, «A term now often on the lips of peopleinterested in modern literature is Sinkurea Jidal, which means 'The SinclairEra.'» Many of the American proletarian novelists who flourished in thethirties had larger sales in Japanese, as in Russian, than they had in theirown language; and the censors at first were rather easy-going. Leafing throughthe proof sheets of translations about to be published, they looked chiefly forJapanese equivalents of three words, «revolution,»«people's,» and «social.» If the dangerous words werepresent, at first they merely deleted them before approving the book forpublication; but later they deleted the whole chapters in which they appearedand, still later, they began throwing the translators and publishers into jail.Hide Ozaki, who had translated Agnes Medley’s Daughter of Earth, was hanged inNovember, 1944, long after some of Sinclair's trans­lators had preceded him tothe scaffold. Safire Judaic had ended.
There was also a Sinclair era in China, where at least seventeen of hisbooks had been published by 1930. Six more were then in process of translation,but nobody in this country, it would seem knows whether they appeared. In Chinathe business of publishing foreign books is not only piratical, as it has beenin Japan, but also completely unorganized. Any bookstore in Shanghai is likelyto issue its own translations without notifying its rivals, let alone theAmerican authors. Some of these authors have been widely read. There were, forexample, at least three translations of The Good Earth, one of which was cutand garbled; the other two were widely discussed in the Chinese press, wheresome of the reviewers—a minority, as might be expected—thought that Mrs. Buckhad presented a true picture. Gone with the Wind appeared in one or moreunauthorized translations. Lao Shaw, the author of Rickshaw Boy, reported forthe Chinese writers born after 1910 that their chosen American author wasEugene O'Neill, who was also most influential with the educated public as awhole. Other favorites were Steinbeck and Saurian.
In India the educated classes read many or most of their American books inthe British colonial editions. Whitman, with what might be called his profoundsmattering of Eastern philosophy, has always had followers there; the greatestof these was Rabindranath Tagore. Gandhi read Thoreau, who contributed to hisphilosophy of nonviolent resistance; also, according to nephew MarinadesGandhi, he read «most if not all» of Upton Sinclair. No study hasbeen made of recent translations into the various Indian languages; but it isknown that The Good Earth was rendered at least into Bengali, and possibly intoothers as well, while various books by Sinclair have appeared in Bengali,Hindi, Gujarati, Tamil, Urdu, Tillage, Marathi, and Singhalese.
Beyond a doubt, Sinclair is the most widely translated novelist of thetwentieth century not read for pure entertainment. By 1938 there had been 713translations of his various books, which had then been published in forty-sevenlanguages and thirty-nine countries. There are several reasons for Sinclair'sinternational popularity. Shortly after he wrote The Jungle, which traveledround the world within two years of its American publication in 1906, he wasadopted as a favorite author by the international working-class movement inboth its main branches, the Menshevik and the Bolshevik, later the SocialDemocratic and the Communist. But his books were also read by the middleclasses in most of the countries where they were allowed to circulate, partlybecause they all told straightforward, rapidly moving stories, but chieflybecause each of his novels, besides being a story, was a well documentedjournalistic survey of some aspect of American life: an industry, a city, apolitical movement, or a celebrated trial. The world-wide interest in UptonSinclair was also an interest in America as a whole.
From any survey of American books abroad, however incomplete it may be,we gain a somewhat different picture of American literature at home. We learn,for example, that it has been richer and more varied than most of us hadsuspected from merely reading our choice of each season's new fiction orfactual reporting. The export of American literary works has not beenstandardized, like that of Detroit automobiles; instead each country has beenchoosing the American books that met its particular tastes. Sometimes thesebooks have been the work of authors little known in the United States whoachieved their widest fame in Europe or Asia. Sometimes American writers havebeen adopted and, as It were, given honorary citizenship by the differ­entcountries to which their minds appealed; so that Faulkner in France, Hemingwayin Russia (like Jack London and Mark Twain before him), O'Neill and Pearl Buckin Scandinavia, Thomas Wolfe in Germany, Waldo Frank in Latin America, andUpton Sinclair in many parts of the world, but especially in the Orient, havecome to be regarded as almost native authors.
At the same time, there are some American books that have swept acrossthe world without pausing at national boundaries. Not a few of them werecritical of American standards, and the reason for their popularity is not hardto explain: foreign readers like to be told that not everything is perfect inthe land of the jukebox and the low-priced automobile. Most of the universallyread books, however, were either adventure stories (a commercialized branch offiction in which our writers have a long tradition of technical skill), or theywere epical novels on the scale of Gone with the Wind and Grapes of Wrath—itdid not matter, apparently, whether they dealt with the past or the present,from a conservative or a radical point of view, so long as they filled a canvasas big as the top of a covered wagon, and so long as they told a story thateveryone could follow.
Story, or narrative, according to the English critic Lovat Dickson, isone of two qualities that distinguish recent American fiction. «To theoutside observer,» he said, «it seemed suddenly to becomecharacteristic of all American entertainment and to mark it off quite sharplyfrom the English equivalent. Story suddenly became of first-rate importance,and appreciation of narrative became a marked American characteristic.»The other quality Dickson mentioned was gusto. «Today it seems to us inEngland,» he said, «the essential, distinctive, and enviable qualityof American fiction. Somewhere and somehow, in the American novel towards theend of the post-war decade, solemnity was miraculously shed and in its placeappeared a new virility as mysteriously and suddenly as the works of Fielding,Sterne, and Smollett had appeared in eighteenth-century England.»
French critics were more impressed by other qualities of American fiction(or by the same qualities under different names): they mentioned its intensityand singleness of emotion, its earthy dialogue, its delight in physical violence,and what they called its «pure exteriority,» a term they applied tothe practice common among American novelists of presenting character in termsof speech and action, without auctorial comments, as if they were writing forthe stage. Russian and Czech critics were deeply impressed by the technicaldiscoveries of our novelists, whom they studied very much as American writersused to study Flaubert. Critics of all nations felt that they were dealing witha unified body of work. For that is our second impression after a survey ofAmerican books abroad: besides being immensely varied, they also possess afamily resemblance that has not always been recognized at home.«American,» said one French critic «is not so much a nationalityas a style.»
During the first half of this century, the position of Americanliterature in foreign countries has been completely transformed. It was stillregarded, before 1900, as a department of English literature, a sort of branchfactory that tried to duplicate the products of the parent firm. After 1930 itcame to be regarded as one of the great world literatures in its own right, andperhaps, as regards contemporary work, the greatest of them all. But thistransformed position was not merely a secondary result of the growth ineconomic and military power of the American nation; it was also an independentdevelopment that testified to a change in the literature itself. Europeans werenot slow to recognize that there had been a literary revival here after 1910;and they showed the same hospitality to the new writers of the interwar periodthat they had shown, a century before, to the writers of the New York and New Englandrenaissance.

Conclusion
Mark Twain isthe most famous American writer in our country. His books are being read in ourcountry for more than one hundred years already, and interest to his creativeactivity is still not decreased.
Opposite, wecan boldly say that with each new generation, who opens for themselves Twain’sbooks, the attention of the reader to Twain becomes broader and deeper.
Thepersonality of a writer constantly causes sympathy and respect because ofunrestrained gaiety of the early Twain and, anger and bitterness of the lateTwain.
During hisknown trip to USA in 1906 A.M. Gorky had got acquaintance with Twain. Theformer characterized the outstanding humorist as following:
«Besideon his large skull there were splendid hair, — somewhat like wild stripes ofwhite, cool fire.” — enchanted by the old writer, Gorky wrote.” From beneathheavy, always half-lowered ages, there is vividly seen a clever and sharp,brilliance, sculpture eye, but, when they are taken a look straight in yourface, you feel that all wrinkles on him are measured and will remain for everin memories of this person.
With the helpof the Twain’s books, tales, journeys, we get acquainted with the Americanfolk, American history, their customs, and the beauty of the American nature. TheGreat Russian poet Nicolay Aseev wrote: “I am very fond of Mark Twain. He, withthe only one wave of his hand, instantly carries me to the bank of the majesticMississippi river. And I see in the silver depths the life of the people of theMississippi.”
We also feelthe same delight of Mark Twain when he, as a real patriot of his country,criticizes his own country. The Russian writer Yury Olesha expressed thethoughts of all our folk, when he wrote, “Mark Twain threw all his genius tothe service for humanity, to the fortification of humans’ belief in them, tothe help of soul development aside to fairness, good and beauties!” And thesewords seem to us as the best to show the significance of Mark Twain forhumanity.

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