Understanding Mark Twain: Mark Twain

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Understanding Mark Twain Mark Twains Novels
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• At my blog, TwainProject.BlogSpot.com, I post
  Twain related articles and photos that showcase
  his time in Redding, Connecticut.
• One day, after a post about one of the Centennial
  Celebrations we were having to commemorate his
  life in Redding, I received the following
  comment/rant

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• Mark Twain is the kind of boring writer that my
  teachers tried to push down my throat in Middle
  School and High School. If there is any way to
  learn about the way people lived back then,
  reading Twain is not it. If theres a literary
  icon or role model for the 19th century, Mark
  Twain is not the one.
• His scatterbrained stories have no meaning or
  reason behind them. He simply wrote for the sake
  of writing

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• The remarks echoed those made by Danbury CTs
  High School English Department Chairman last year
  in the Danbury News-Times
• His Twains influence is waning. Its a lot
  more difficult to get kids interested in his
  writings. Sometimes, its because its more
  satirical and less blunt humor than they hear
  today.

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• The issue here is real- teachers students dont
  get Twain because they dont know Twain. After a
  great deal of thought discussion with others, I
  concluded that we may be teaching Twain wrong.
• What if kids got to know Twain first?
• Maybe if they better understood his life
  experiences, theyd understand why he wrote what
  he wrote and want to read his works.

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• Here is a preview of my solution to this issue,
  and what Id like to present to classrooms across
  America.

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Hellomy name is Samuel L. Clemens. A.K.A. Mark
Twain!
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• I came in with Halleys Comet in 1835. It is
  coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go
  out with it. It will be the greatest
  disappointment of my life if I dont go out with
  Halleys Comet.
• -Mark Twain, a Biography In 1910, Halleys
  Comet reached perihelion on April 20th and Mark
  Twain died on the 21st.

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Halleys Comet
Died 04/21/1910
Born 11/30/1835
Redding, Connecticut
Florida, Missouri
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Sure You could call me Rags to Riches
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Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was born in this cabin
in the small frontier settlement of Florida,
Missouri.
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Interior of Florida, Missouri home
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• He was born two months premature, on November
  30th 1835.
• The sixth child of John and Jane Clemens.
• Premature babies at that time period did not
  usually survive. The frontier was a harsh
  environment and children routinely died from
  diseases such as measles, smallpox, scarlet fever
  and malaria.

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• When I first saw him I could see no promise in
  him.
• Jane Clemens, his mother.

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• Sam survived, but would spent a good amount of
  his first four years of life in bed. There he
  would absorb and retain many of the sounds and
  voices that surrounded him.
• Hearing is believed to develop very quickly in
  premature babies and Sam would exhibit an unusual
  ability to retain the sounds he heard around him
  in his younger years, especially, the dialects of
  speech.

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• He never stopped performing the earliest songs
  and spirituals he heard, and as a mature writer
  he could reproduce entire blocks of spoken
  conversation.
• His capacity to transform commonplace spoken
  language into literature, like any artists gift,
  remains beyond understanding.
• -Ron Powers, Mark Twain, a Life

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• Other Talented Premature Babies
• Pablo Picasso
• Isaac Newton
• Albert Einstein
• Charles Darwin
• Renoir
• John Keats
• Franklin Roosevelt
• Stevie Wonder

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• Many, if not all, of Mark Twain novels and
  stories were directly tied to his life
  experiences.
• His earliest life experiences, specifically his
  exposure to slaves and slavery, are brought to
  life in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
• In many ways Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is
  autobiographical.

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• Understanding Huckleberry Finn
• Although the Missouri he grew up in never joined
  the Confederacy, it was a world in which slavery
  was accepted and practiced by most white
  families Sam's parents owned slaves, his Uncle
  John did too.
• In fact, slavery was defended by all of
  Missouris public institutions, including the
  churches.

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• Understanding Huckleberry Finn
• In Twains Notebook 35 he writes
• In those slave-holding days the whole community
  was agreed as to one thing- the awful sacredness
  of slave property.
• It shows that that strange thing, the
  conscience - the unerring monitor - can be
  trained to approve any wild thing you want it to
  approve if you begin its education early stick
  to it.

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• Understanding Huckleberry Finn
• Unlike many Missourians, Twain left Missouri in
  his teens and traveled to several Northern States
  that frowned upon Slavery and the hatred that
  fueled it.

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Sams teenage travels 2,000 miles
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• Understanding Huckleberry Finn
• As he matured, he came to realize the wrongs that
  he had unknowingly been a part of and through his
  writings he exposed the wrongs that he had seen
  committed.

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• Understanding Huckleberry Finn
• In Following the Equator, he says
• When I was ten years old I saw a man fling a
  lump of iron-ore at a slave-man in anger, for
  merely doing something awkwardly- as if that were
  a crime. It bounded from the mans skull, and the
  man fell and never spoke again. He was dead in an
  hour Nobody in the village approved of that
  murder, but of course no one said much about it.
  (Chapter 38)

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• Understanding Huckleberry Finn
• His association with Slavery left him with a
  legacy of guilt, guilt that he tried to lessen
  through acts of charity. He donated money and
  made special appearances at fundraising events
  for numerous African American Churches,
  Institutes, and Associations. He also supported
  individuals.

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• Understanding Huckleberry Finn
• In 1885, the year Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  was released, he anonymously paid the tuition for
  Warner T. McGuinn, a struggling African American
  law student at Yale Law School.
• In a letter to Yales Law School Dean, he noted
  We have ground the manhood out of them, the
  shame is ours, not theirs, we should pay for
  it.

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• Understanding Huckleberry Finn
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is powerful
  because of its realism. The situations, the
  topics, the conversations, and the dialects he
  uses in those conversations all come from Twains
  unique life experiences.
• Jims words and the way he speaks are all tied
  to Twains childhood

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• Understanding Huckleberry Finn
• Ron Powers, Mark Twain, a Life
• He heard his first slave voices before the age
  of four, and sought them out through the rest of
  his childhood and beyond.
• no human voices, save his own mothers, caught
  his imagination quite like those of the Negro
  slaves

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• Understanding Huckleberry Finn
• Those voices spoke in a way different from the
  people in his family quick, delicious, throbbing
  with urgencies half-named, half-encoded. They
  conjured mind-pictures lightning bolts,
  apparitions from the spirit world, chariots
  swooping down from heaven the slave voices
  treated language as a cherished creature, to be
  passed around, partaken of

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• Understanding Huckleberry Finn
• One of the slave voices that influenced Sams
  life was a middle aged slave known to him as
  Uncle Danl
• Hed later recall the privileged nights he, his
  cousins the slave children clustered at Danls
  feet to hear him tell his thunderous stories.

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• Understanding Huckleberry Finn
• He has served me well, these many, many
  yearsspiritually I have had his welcome company
  have staged him in books as his own name and as
  Jim
• It was on the farm that I got my strong liking
  for his race and my appreciation of its fine
  qualities.

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• Understanding Huckleberry Finn
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn took Twain 8 years
  to write. Between manuscript 1 and 2, he made
  more than 1,700 revisions. 88 percent of these
  revisions being word changes, spelling,
  punctuation and adding emphasis. He used the
  words he used for a reason.
• The N-Word appears 219 times in the novel and
  its usage is deliberate.

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• "The difference between the almost right word and
  the right word is really a large matter it's
  the difference between the lightning bug and the
  lightning."
• -Mark Twain

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• Understanding Huckleberry Finn
• The N-Word appears 219 times for two reasons.
• 1. Its usage is historically correct. That is
  how white people referred to African- Americans
  in that time period.
• 2. It shows/screams at us how wrong and
  hurtful that mindset was.

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• Understanding Huckleberry Finn
• As the novel progresses, Huck matures and
  realizes the wrongs of the slavery society hes
  grown up in much like Twain himself did.
• Hucks decision to reject that societys values
  and go to Hell, rather than betray his friend
  Jim is one of the novels most powerful moments.

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• Understanding Huckleberry Finn
• Huck discovers "you can't pray a lie" and that
  helping Jim is the right thing to do -- even if
  society's most pious and learned insist that
  aiding a runaway is perverted and wicked.

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• Understanding Huckleberry Finn
• Twain once described the novel as
• "a book of mine where a sound heart and a
  deformed conscience come into collision and
  conscience suffers a defeat." He also once said
  My books are simply autobiographies
• and in many ways Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
  is just that

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In summary I am not a Racist.
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Now back to my life story.
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Many of Twains characters, including Huckleberry
Finn, were a product of his childhood
experiences in Hannibal.
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Sams family moved to nearby Hannibal, Missouri
in 1839, where hed enjoy his boyhood in the
presence of the broad Mississippi River.
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• Location, Location, Location
• Hannibal was the center of America at a time when
  America was making the transition from East to
  West. Sam had a very unique, front row seat to
  civilization Immigrants, Merchants, Speculators,
  Gamblers, Thieves, Politicians, Preachers,
  Runaways Indians he saw it all on the river
  front and he soaked it all in.

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The Great Frontier The West is largely unsettled
by Americans.
United States in 1835
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• Location, Location, Location
• Because of Hannibals River-side location and
  Americas Westward expansion, Sam would
  experience a very diverse group of individuals or
  as Ron Powers notes in Mark Twain, a Life
• a continuing vaudeville of floating humanity.

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• When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or
  biography I generally take a warm personal
  interest in him, for the reason that I have known
  him before--met him on the river.
• - Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

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• Location, Location, Location
• The education that Sam would receive in Hannibal
  from the age of four to the age of seventeen
  would come through loud and clear in his novels
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The
  Adventures of Tom Sawyer

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From here I would go on to describe his
childhood, education, teenage travels, etc
Feedback is welcomed, please e-mail me
at bcolley_at_colleyweb.com