【文档】A Tiny Biography of Mark Twain（英语外研必修五）.docVIP

A Tiny Biography of Mark Twain Ever A Gold Digger! Sam Clemens never finished what he started — before the age of twenty-five, that is. By age twenty-five he had quit school to work for a newspaper typesetter, quit setting type to pilot a Mississippi steamer, quit river-boating to join the Confederate Army and shortly thereafter, deserted the army to go West and dig for riches. Thankfully for generations of readers, he found none; and, while recouping his losses, he instead latched onto a bit of wisdom that would change the landscape of American literature. “There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life that he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.” Which is Twain’s birth place? Florida? Missouri? Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, on 30 November 1835. As he later said, he was brought in on Halley’s Comet and wished to go out on its return. He was raised in Hannibal, on the Missouri banks of the Mississippi. He was the sixth of seven children. At age twelve, sometime after his father’s death in 1847, he left school and apprenticed at a local printer’s shop. There, in what Abraham Lincoln later called the “poor boy’s college”, Clemens trained as a writer and critic. How Twain Set His Writing Style? “One isn’t a printer ten years without setting up acres of good and bad literature, and learning — unconsciously at first, consciously later — to discriminate between the two ... and meantime, he is unconsciously acquiring what is a “style”. The literature he set into type varied in genre from anecdotes, to monologues, brief book excerpts, poems, and sketches by contemporary humorists. What these selections had in common was that they were all self-contained pieces — short and to the point. “Training is,” as Twain later wrote, “everything”; and so, it should come as no surprise that Twain himself survives in our hearts (and on the tip of our tongues) as easily excerpt able and eminently quotabl