Mark Twain and His Literary Works
萨缪尔·兰亨·克莱门斯（1835-1910）出生于密苏里州佛罗里达。他的父亲是一位充满拓荒精神和毕生怀着轻松致富的宏伟梦想的弗吉尼亚人，一生都在不停地寻找土地投机的利益。这家人定居在密苏里州的汉尼拔（1839年），萨缪尔在那里受这种态度的影响长大，度过了汤姆·索耶和哈克贝利·费恩的冒险童年和青春。父亲去世后（1847年），他离开学校去一家印刷厂当学徒，不久就为哥哥Orion的报纸撰稿。1853年至1854年，他在东部和中西部地区（East and Middle West）成为一名熟练的印刷工，1856年，他计划到南美洲寻找财富，但最后放弃了这个想法，成为一名密西西比河上的汽船驾驶员，他认为这个职位是他一生中最重要的人生历练。内战开始时，内河船只停止运行，在与一群南方志愿者度过一段短暂的军营生活后，克莱门斯与被任命为州长秘书的兄弟一起前往内华达州。在《苦行记》一书中，他描述了他作为矿工和记者的西部之旅以及随后的历险。在加入弗吉尼亚城领土企业组织（1862年）后，他改名为马克·吐温（Mark Twain），并开始了他作为边疆传统的新闻幽默作家的职业生涯。他在此期间的文章被收录在《企业中的马克·吐温》（1957）中。在这段时间里，他遇见了阿泰默斯·沃德和其他人，在他们的鼓励下，他与布雷特·哈特在旧金山合作写下了杂文《著名的跳蛙》（1865年），并使他立即获得了认可。他通过写信和演讲提高了自己的知名度，讲述了自己的桑威治群岛之旅，去东部演讲，出版了《卡拉维拉斯县的著名跳蛙和其他随笔》（1867）。马克·吐温游览了他在《海外无辜者》（the Innocents Abroad，1869）中描述的地中海和圣地，这是一段幽默的故事，确保了他作为主要作家的地位，显示了他典型的美国人对经典和古董的不敬。1870年，克莱门斯与奥利维娅·兰登结婚，并在康涅狄格州哈特福德定居。1872年，他在《苦行记》（Roughing It，1872）中延续了《海外无辜者》的写作手法，以他高度个人化的幽默用语的夸张手法，为现实的冒险故事增添了趣味。接下来，他与C.D.Warner在《镀金时代》（The Gilded Age，1878）中合作，这是一部描述内战后繁荣时期的讽刺小说。《浪迹海外》（1880）是另一部旅行故事，这次是穿越黑森林和阿尔卑斯山的徒步旅行。《王子与贫儿》（1882）的 背景是爱德华六世统治时期的英国，而《亚瑟王宫廷中的康涅狄格州扬基人》（1889）则是对亚瑟王英格兰的现实讽刺。然而，在这一时期，克莱门斯在他最具美国特色的作品中，讲述了自己早期生活的场景。在《汤姆·索耶历险记》（1876）中，他讲述了一个怀旧的故事，讲述了在密西西比州的一个小镇上孩子气的冒险经历，在《密西西比河上的生活》（1883）和《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》（1884）中，通过自己辛辣的高谈阔论和流浪汉冒险，他盛赞了密西西比边疆文明的繁荣。外部事件很快就干扰了克莱门斯的创作活动。在哈特福德居住期间，他曾是查尔斯·韦伯斯特出版公司（Charles L.Webster and Company）的合伙人，该公司通过出售《格兰特回忆录》（Grant’s Memoirs）和克莱门斯自己的作品赚了一大笔钱，但糟糕的出版风险和对一台不完善的排字机的20万美元投资使他破产（1894年）。为了还清债务，他进行了一次世界巡回演讲，尽管他已经开始不喜欢演讲，而这次旅行的记录《赤道旅行记》（1897年）中有一种他早期旅行书籍中没有的辛酸潜流。在这十年里，尽管他写了《帕德海德·维尔森的悲剧》（1894年）和《圣女贞德的个人回忆》（1896年），但他的大部分作品质量参差不齐。《美国原告》（1892年）、《汤姆·索耶在国外》（1894）以及《侦探汤姆·索亚》（1896）都是早期作品的微弱复制。1898年，他还清了债务，但他的著作表明，他以前压抑的悲观主义压力现在支配着他的思想。《腐化哈德莱堡的人》（1900），《人是什么？》（1906年）和《神秘陌生人》（1916年）证明了这种态度。他继续广泛旅行，讲学并撰写关于当代事件的文章，以及诸如《基督教科学》（1907）和《莎士比亚死了吗？》（1909），但他的痛苦因失去妻子和两个女儿而加深。他的悲观主义也许并不比他自己的塞勒斯上校的乐观主义更深刻，但他觉得这种悲观主义太刻薄，不适合出版，因此他指示某些作品在死后出版。自1906年以来，他一直在向秘书A.B.Paine口述他的自传，后者后来成为马克·吐温庄园的第一位文学编辑，并出版了一本书信集（1917年）、授权传记（1912年第3卷）和自传（1924年）。第二位编辑伯纳德·德沃托（Bernard DeVoto）编辑了克莱门斯（Clemens）留下的论文中的大量材料，包括《地球来信》（Letters from The Earth）（1963年）。第三位编辑狄克逊·韦克特（Dixon Wecter）利用同样的资料来源，收集了《马克·吐温的情书》（1949年）；第四位编辑亨利·纳什·史密斯（Henry Nash Smith）与威廉·吉布森（William M.Gibson）合编了《马克·吐温-豪威尔斯书信》（Mark Twain-Howells Letters）（1960年第二卷）。《我的马克·吐温：回忆与批判》（1910）是对他的一个重要的早期评价，作者是他的朋友兼顾问豪厄尔斯。流行的批评态度认为克莱门斯最有特色的作品是对西方幽默和边疆现实主义传统的总结。作为一名记者，他开始采用美国通俗文学的方法和观点，保持他作为喜剧演讲者所使用的个人轶事风格。在旅游书籍中，他很容易从事实叙事转向幽默的夸张和滑稽。这些小说是情节性的或自传体的，不是由任何更大的结构概念构成的。他用地道的土生土长的用语写作，充满热情和不敬，但幽默的背后是对社会正义的强烈渴望和普遍的平等态度。《圣女贞德传》的浪漫理想主义，《康涅狄格州扬基》中对封建暴政的辛辣讽刺，《哈克贝利·费恩》中对人类价值的欣赏，以及《密西西比河上的生活》中史诗般的横扫感，确立了克莱门斯在美国文学中的地位，他是一位具有广泛理解力和重要成就的艺术家。
Mark Twain and His Literary Works
Samuel Langhorne Clemens(1835-1910), born in Florida, Missouri, was the son of a Virginian imbued with the frontier spirit and grandiose dreams of easy wealth.The family settled in Hannibal, Missouri (1839), where Samuel grew up under the influence of this attitude, and passed the adventurous boyhood and youth that he recalls in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Fimn. After his father's death (1847), he left school to be apprenticed to a printer,and was soon writing for his brother Orion's newspaper. He was a journeyman printer in the East and Middle West(1853-4), and in 1856 planned to seek his fortune in South America, but gave up this idea to become a
steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, a position that he considered the most important discipline of his life. When the Civil War began, the river boats ceased operation,and, after a brief trial of soldiering with a group of Confederate volunteers, Clemens went to Nevada with his brother, who had been appointed secretary to the governor. In Roughing It he describes the trip west and his subsequent adventures as miner and journalist. After he joined the staff of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise (1862),he adopted the pseudonym Mark Twain, by which he was thereafter known, and began his career as a journalistic humorist in the frontier tradition. His articles of the time are collected in Mark Twain of the Enterprise(1957). During this period he met Artemus Ward and others who encouraged his work, collaborated with Bret Harte ,in San Francisco, and wrote 'The Celebrated
Jumping Frog' sketch (1865), which won him immediate recognition. He increased his popularity with letters and lectures about his trip to the Sandwich Islands, went East to lecture,published
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867). and made the tour of the Mediterranean and the Holy Land that he describes in The Innocents Abroad (1869), a humorous narrative that assured his position as a leading author and shows his typical American irreverence for the classic and the antique.ln1870 Clemens married Olivia Langdon, with whom he settled in Hartford, Connecticut. In Roughing It (1872)he continues the method of The Innocents Abroad, seasoning the realistic account of adventure with humorous exaggerations in his highly personal idiom. Next he collaborated with C.D.Warner in The Gilded Age (1878),a satirical novel of post-Civil War boom times t. A Tramp Abroad (1880) is another travel narrative, this time of a walking trip through the Black Forest and the Alps. England during the reign of Edward VI is the scene of The Prince and the Pauper (1882), while A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court(1889) is a realistic-satirical fantasy of Arthurian England. During this period, however, Clemens was dealing with the background of his own early life in what are generally considered the most significant of his characteristically American works. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) he presents a nostalgic tale of boyish adventure in a Mississippi town, and in Life on the Mississippi (1883) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)he celebrates the flowering of Mississippi frontier civilization, in terms of its own pungent tall talk and picaresque adventure. External events soon interfered with the even flow of Clemens's creative activity. During his residence in Hartford, he had been a partner in the publishing firm of Charles L. Webster and Company, which reaped a fortune through the sale of Grant's Memoirs and Clemens's own writings, but bad publishing ventures and the investment of ＄200,000 in an unperfected typesetting machine drove him into bankruptcy (1894).
To discharge his debts he made a lecturing tour of the world, although he had come to dislike lecturing, and the record of this tour, Following the Equator (1897), has an undercurrent of bitterness not found in his earlier travel books. During this decade,although he wrote The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Vilson (1894) and the Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc(1896)， most of his work is uneven in quality, and The American Claimant（1892), Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)are feeble echoes of earlier work.In 1898 he finished paying off his debts,but his writings show that the strain of pessimism , he formerly repressed was now dominating his mind. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900),What Is Man?(1906), and The Mysterious Stranger ( 1916) demonstrate this attitude. He continued to travel widely, lectured and wrote articles on contemporary events and such controversial works as Christian Science(1907) and Is Shakespeare Dead?(1909), but his bitterness was deepened by the loss of his wife and two daughters. His pessimism was perhaps no more profound than the optimism of his own Colonel Sellers, but his feeling that it was too mordant for publication caused him to instruct that certain of his works be published posthumously. Since 1906 he had been engaged in dictating his autobiography to his secretary,A.B.Paine, who later became the first Literary Editor of the Mark Twain Estate, and issued a collection of Letters(1917), the authorized biography (3vols.,1912),and the Autobiography(1924).The second editor, Bernard DeVoto, edited volumes of materials from the papers left by Clemens, including Letters from the Earth (1963). Drawing on the same sources, the third editor,Dixon Wecter, collected The Love Letters of Mark Twain (1949): and the fourth editor, Henry Nash Smith, has edited with William M. Gibson, Mark Twain- Howells Letters (2 vols., 1960).An important early estimate of his work is My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms (1910), by his friend and adviser Howells. The prevalent critical attitude has come to consider Clemens's most distinctive work as summing up the tradition of Western humor and frontier realism. Beginning as a journalist, he assumed the method and point of view of popular literature in the U.S.,maintaining the personal anecdotal style that he used also in his capacity of comic lecturer. In travel books, he digresses easily from factual narrative to humorous exaggeration and burlesque. The novels are episodic or autobiographical, and not formed by any larger structural concepts. He wrote in the authentic native idiom, exuberantly and irreverently, but underlying the humor was a vigorous desire for social justice and a pervasive equalitarian attitude.The romantic idealism of Joan of Arc,the bitter satire of feudal tyranny in A Connecticut Yankee, the appreciation of human values in Huckleberry Finn, and the sense of epic sweep in Life on the Mississippi establish Clemens's place in American letters as an artist of broad understanding and vital.
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