Mark Twain Life And Racism
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Contents
INTRODUCTION
I. THE CREATION OF MARK TWAIN
1 BOYHOOD
2 YOUTH
3 THE EAST AND THE MIDWEST
4 RIVERBOAT PILOT AND “SOLDIER”
5 NEVADA
6 SAN FRANCISCO
II. YEARS OF SUCCESS
1 LECTURER
2 THE EAST, AGAIN
3 THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
4 LIVY AND BUFFALO
5 ROUGHING IT
6 THE GILDED AGE
7 PRODUCTIVE SUMMERS
8 TOM SAWYER
9 A TRAMP ABROAD
10 THE PRINCE AND THE MISSISSIPPI
11 HUCKLEBERRY FINN AND A CONNECTICUT YANKEE
III. YEARS OF TROUBLE
1 EUROPE, AGAIN
2 FINANCIAL DISASTER AND TRAGEDY
3 RETURN
4 LATE YEARS
5 LAST HONOUR
IV. MARK TWAIN – A RACIST WRITER ?
1 THE TASK
2 CHILD OF THE SOUTH
3 CHANGING VIEWS
4 THE KEY
5 HUCK AND JIM
6 HUCKS LESSON
7 GOING TO HELL
8 WHY DID HUCK USE THE “N”WORD ?
9 THE END
10 CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
CHRONOLOGY
YOUR PAGE
MY FAVORITE MARK TWAIN QUOTES
Introduction
In 1835 Halleys Comet blazed across the night sky of the United States. At that time the country was still rural. When the comet blazed once again across the night sky in 1910, the country had seen the industrial revolution, its population and the number of states had increased dramatically. It had seen many inventions, but also the bloody Civil War.
And the country, as well as the comet, had seen Samuel Langhorne Clemens, alias Mark Twain, come and go. His life was mysteriously tied to the comet, and since they had arrived together in 1835 he was sure and always predicted that they should exit together in 1910.
The seventy-five years in between he filled with an eventful life, restless wandering from one place to another, finally becoming one of Americas greatest writers.
Today he is also one of the most often criticised writers, his books being banned on the accuse of racism. So in the second part of this study I shall try to answer the question, whether Mark Twain really was a racist writer.
First let us turn to Twains biography. In his best works he was always his own biographer, and so it is easy to turn to his books for a lively account of his life. Nonetheless, I will tell his story. I will not reach the standard of the master himself, but I shall try
I. The Creation of Mark Twain
1 Boyhood
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, in the small village of Florida, Missouri. The sixth of the seven children of Jane and John Marshall Clemens was a weak and sick baby, who barely survived the first two winters. But it should live well into the twentieth century.
John Clemens was a lawyer and storekeeper who had moved his family several times seeking better opportunities. He had invested in land and businesses, hoping to become rich quickly. But by the time Clemens was born, most of his fathers wealth had been lost, and his family sank deeper and deeper into poverty.
Hoping to stop this decline, in 1839, he moved his family to Hannibal, Missouri, when Clemens was four years old. Hannibal seemed to be a town with a future, because it lay on the Mississippi and steamboats stopped there several times a day. It was bound to become world famous as St.Petersburg in the books of this little new citizen.
When Clemens was just sixteen, he wrote a description of Hannibal, which was published in the Philadelphia American Courier:
“The first home was built in this city about sixteen years ago The town is situated on the Mississippi river, about one hundred and thirty miles above St. Louis, and contains a population of about three thousand.”1
He had tripled the number of inhabitants of his hometown, in order to see his description published.
His early life in Hannibal, as his books would later describe, was filled with youthful play and adventure. He and his friends fished, hunted, swam, explored and caused trouble. Clemens spent long and hot summer days on his uncles farm, he experienced the slow pace of life on the Mississippi. From this childhood would come the settings, scenes, and characters of his most famous works, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
But the dark sides of Hannibal found their way into Clemens works, too. He witnessed slave beatings, random acts of cruelty, and even a murder or two. One night he discovered the dead body of a man lying on the floor of his fathers law office, the victim of a recent stabbing. Maybe because of these experiences, the overly sensitive and still somewhat sickly youth was troubled by nightmares and was known to walk in his sleep.
At the age of five, Clemens started his formal education. “School taught him reading, writing, and arithmetic, and