MARK TWAIN

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After the 1860s people used newspapers. Mark started his career as a journalist, thats why we find different
setting and types of cultures of different points of America in Huckleberry Finn. Part of what Twain also does in this
novel is a kind of nostalgia of old times, the industrialism after 1865, the war years as a reference. Mark Twain was a
regionalism writer of Missouri. The importance of regionalism is that it gives voice to those who had no voice in
society: immigrants, black people and women. The realists were people who were in power, mostly white men writers.
The regionalists were people who had been removed from power (immigrants, black people and women). The figure of
the woman appears in literature. They react against the domestic kind of writing and they start to write about sex
outside marriage and adultery. There were a lot of journalist women who were earning salaries.
! Mark Twain grew up in Missouri. The Mississipi river was the large geographical separation between the north
and the south. Twain became a steam boat pilot, thats why he knew the river so well. He briefly served in the military
army, but he decided to work as a journalist. Humor is an important part in his career. He makes emphasis on the
dissapearance of the frontier. Gentile tradition was a culture of the plantation (Gone With The Wind). It is a very
conservative culture in values and it didnt want to introduce any kind of changes. Twain looks at this kind of world
with nostalgia because it was the world in which he grew up, but also with humor. He makes fun of families within the
gentile tradition because he thought that they had no place in America. This humor presents a contrast between
civilization and wilderness. Huck wants to be free. This strong desire for freedom is connected with Jim, who is a slave.
! Literary contradiction flourished in the Gilded Age, and Twain manifested it. Never quite sure whether to enjoy
or condemn, Twain developed two warring voices: that of the boyish comedian, that of the bitter satirist. He found
himself able to identify with Tom Sawyer in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, an evocation of his Mississippi boyhood
life and a classic boys tale of a romantic adventurer enjoying treasure hunting, infant loves and secret games just
beyond the gaze of the adult world.
! Like all Western humorists, Twains work is filled with stories about how ordinary people trick experts.
Twains most famous character, Huck Finn, is a master at this. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the book with
which, according to Hemingway, American literature really starts. Twains decision was to tell the story in Hucks first-
person, therefore, we must read the book in naivete and wonder. Huck has no complete vocabulary for what he does;
his tone of spoken innocence voices the clear-seeing eye of childhood which can question so many social values by
failing to comprehend them. The drifting river transforms his journey into an intuitive quest and, in the process, Hucks
dialect becomes a literary language. It remains nonetheless a comic language. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is
not just a story of nature but society, the society of the mercantile exploiting innocence for gain.
! Twain devoted all his late work to his pessimistic vision, revealing, behind the popular humorist, a dark satirist
receptive to the rising determinism that was turning optimistic American thought to doubt and self questioning.
! Some critics complain that Twain wrote well only when he was writing about young people. This may be true,
but in his greatest novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain gives his young hero very adult problems. He
thinks deeply about morality and then decides to break the law. After that, he is not a child anymore. Many see The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as the great novel of American democracy. In his later novels, Twain seems less
hopeful about democracy.
! Throughout all of Twains writing, we see the conflict between the ideals of Americans and their desire for
money. Twain never tried to solve the conflict because he was not an intellectual. He was like a newspaperman who
reports what he sees.