高级英语1 lesson7 课文原文.doc

Mark Twain --- Mirror of America By Noel Grove Most Americans remember Mark Twain as the father of Huck Finn’s idyllic cruise through eternal boyhood and Tom Sawyer’s endless summer of freedom and adventure. Indeed, this nation’s best-loved author was every bit as adventurous, patriotic, romantic, and humorous as anyone has ever imagined. I found another Twain --- one who grew cynical, bitter, saddened by the profound personal tragedies life dealt him, a man who became obsessed with frailties of the human race, who saw clearly ahead a black wall of night. Tramp printer, river pilot, Confederate guerrilla, prospector, starry-eyed optimist, acid-tongued cynic: the man who became Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens and he ranged across the nation for more than a third of his life, digesting the new American experience before sharing it with the world as writer and lecturer. He adopted his pen name from the cry heard in his steamboat days, signaling two fathoms (12 feet) of water --- a navigable depth. His popularity is attested by the fact that more than a score of his books remain in print, and translations are still read around the world. The geographic core, in Twain’s early years, was the great valley of the Mississippi River, main artery of transportation in the young nation’s heart. Keelboats, flatboats, and large rafts carried the first major commerce. Lumber, corn, tobacco, wheat, and furs moved downstream to the delta country; sugar, molasses, cotton, and whiskey traveled north. In the 1850s’, before the climax of Westward Expansion, the vast basin drained three quarters of the settled United States. Young Mark Twain entered the world in 1857 as a cub pilot on a steamboat. The cast of characters set before him in his new profession was rich and varied --- a cosmos. He participated abundantly in his life, listening to pilothouse talk of feuds, piracies, lynchings, medicine show, and savage waterside slums. All would resurface in his books, together wi