Monday, March 29, 2010

Samuel Clemens's short bio

Born on November 30, 1835, Samuel Clemens grew up in the town of Florida, Missouri. Missouri was a slave state and Sam’s father owned a slave, so naturally slavery contributed to Clemens’s development. After completing fifth grade in 1847, Clemens left school to work for the local newspaper, arranging the stories for printing. In 1853, Sam went to New York City, where he worked for more newspapers and contributed articles as well. This was his first professional writing job. After that, he took a job working on a steamboat on the Mississippi River. His experiences there influenced his novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Next, he joined the Confederate Army but quit after two weeks. His experience there contributed to his adamant pacifism later in life. Then in 1861, Clemens’s brother Orion was appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory. Clemens accompanied him to Nevada, where he tried his hand at silver mining, hoping to strike it rich, but he never succeeded. He started working for the Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise, where he first used his pen name Mark Twain.
            Clemens’s first large success was his short story, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”, which was published countrywide. After that, he was hired by the Sacramento Union to report on the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). His articles became more and more popular. He was next hired to visit Europe and the Middle East by the Alta California. Samuel Clemens married Olivia Langdon in 1870. He took a job working for the Buffalo Express in Buffalo, New York, and then in 1871 moved to Hartford, Connecticut where he wrote many of his novels. One book he co-wrote, The Gilded Age, criticized the obsession with getting rich, while at the same time Clemens enjoyed a huge, expensive, new house.
            Samuel Clemens’s largest downfall was when he became bankrupt in 1891 due to bad investing. His friend Henry Rodgers, a principal at Standard Oil, helped Clemens to get in money in order after that. Clemens still wanted to pay back his debts so he set off on an expansive lecture tour around the world to earn money. He finally returned to the United States in 1900 after earning enough money to pay everyone back. On August 21, 1910, Samuel Clemens died of a heart attack.
            Other events that could have affected Clemens’s writing are the deaths of his first two daughters and his wife in 1896, 1909, and 1904.
            Twain’s literary influences include Charles Dickens and the Gothic romance style, Thomas Paine and the revelatory style, and Josh Billings and the humorist style. Twain is most associated with humorous or satirical writing and his onomatopoeic habit of depicting dialect, which contribute to his renown as a pillar of American literature and language.


Sources:
Gribben, Alan. "Samuel Langhorne Clemens." American Short-Story Writers Before 1880. Ed. Bobby Ellen Kimbel and William E. Grant. Detroit: Gale Research, 1988. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 74. Literature Resource Center. Web. 7 Feb. 2010.

The Mark Twain House. "Biography." The Mark Twain House. Web. 30 Mar. 2010. .

No comments:

Post a Comment