美国文学( Mark Twain)完整版.pptxVIP

American Literature Lecture Eleven Mark Twain Mark Twain (1835- 1910) 1. Life of Mark Twain • Mark Twain ’s rise to fame began with the publication in 1865 of “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog, ” a comic tale (he later calle “villainous backwoods未开垦的 ， 偏僻森林地 带 sketch ”) that he heard in a mining camp n far from his cabin on Jackass Hill in the California gold country. • By the time of his death, forty-five years later, Twain ’ s popularity as an author a lecturer was worldwide, and he had become one of the most celebrated American of his day. • “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaver as County, ” as his frog story was later titled, was one of the many tall tal Twain heard in the western mining camps where he had gone in 1861 when he was twenty-five. His adventurous boyhood had been spent in Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi River. • At the death of his father, in 1847, Twain had left school to be apprenticed to a pr in A brief but glorious career as a Mississi River steamboat pilot ended when the river was blockaded at the beginning of the Civi War, and after a short term of soldiering a a Confederate volunteer, Twain went to Nevada, hoping to strike it rich in the sil fields. • When his mining schemes failed, he joined the staff of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, exchanged his real name, Samuel L. Clemens, for a pseudonym, “Mark Twain, ” and began his career as a frontier humorist. • In 1866, after six years as a miner, newspaper reporter, and lecturer in California, Nevada, and Hawaii, Twain went east responding, he said, to a “ call literature of a low order— i.e. humorous. He took with him a reputation as “the wild humorist of the Pacific Slope ” and a live imagination that had led him to turn many of his newspaper “reports ” into burlesques and comic sketches. • While in New York, Twain was commissioned by a San Francisco paper to sail on a five-month voyage with a group of American tourists and report their confront