Autobiography of mark twain theme of writing

Regarding rhythm, Mark Twain depends on different rhythmic techniques, which include repetition and polysyndeton. Besides this, he also molds his sentences to make them fluent, direct and simple, along with making group words to stand out at places where he wants. He also uses consonant and vowel sounds carefully to create rhythmic flow in his prose.

This passage occurs in his novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Regarding his prose, Mark Twain depends on narrative and comparative techniques to make his narrative rhetoric impactful and strong. For example, he constantly compares characters in both adventures of Tom Sawyer as well as Huck Finn. Besides, he compares events and places and narrates them according to the nature of his audience.

Regarding strategies, he excessively relies on repetitions, rhetorical questions and polysyndetons. The latent ironybesides these, adds to the forcefulness of his narrative argument. This passage shows the use of some of these techniques. The summer evenings were long. With popular works like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain was regarded as a master storyteller in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and readers eagerly anticipated his memoirs.

Readers were therefore profoundly disappointed when the first version of the Twain's autobiography was published in as a mass of incomplete biographical notes and observations that lacked organization. Later versions have tried to correct this problem by removing awkward sections or adding or rearranging other sections as necessary. None of the editors have chosen to include Twain's complete typescript in the order in which Twain intended.

Read more from the Study Guide. Browse all BookRags Study Guides. All rights reserved. Toggle navigation. Sign Up. Sign In. This Study Guide consists of approximately 73 pages of chapter autobiographies of mark twain theme of writing, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Autobiography of Mark Twain.

The second volume, published in Octobercomprises pages and collects dictations spanning eleven months, from April 2,to February 28, It contains dictations spanning thirty-one months, from March 1,to October 21, The autobiography concludes with a piece composed in December in which Twain expresses his sorrow over the death of his youngest daughter and states that, along with her, his incentive for writing the autobiography has perished.

As a result, the edition carries copyright marks for andand will not enter the public domain until David Bollier criticized the Mark Twain Foundation and the University of California Press for this action, stating, "So is the argument that academic presses have a special entitlement to game the usual terms of copyright law because they are doing God's work as academic presses?

Copyright industries frequently inveigh against the 'theft' of sharing copyrighted works online, solemnly intoning that 'the law is the law. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikidata item. Collection of reminiscences by Mark Twain.

Twain's writings and dictations [ edit ]. Plans for posthumous publication [ edit ]. Although Charles Neider's version of the The Autobiography of Mark Twain is organized chronologically, the material within each chapter still reflects Twain's original intent to impose no structure on the material other than that which was created by his freeform dictations.

This lack of formal organization forces the reader to pay greater attention to details, since the details are not neatly packaged. The lack of formal organization also creates links between subjects that might not be there in a truly chronological autobiography, and thus provides an insight into the author's thought patterns. For example, in the chapter where Twain first talks about his mother, he describes her extreme compassion, writing, "my mother would not have allowed a rat to be restrained of its liberty.

What is the purpose of this abrupt switch in narrative? One imagines Twain dictating this passage, with an image of the rat his mother would try to save. It could be at this point that he starts to think about rats in general, and how rats are usually associated with poor conditions. This would provide the link to the paragraph about poverty.

In any case, analyzing the text in this manner, especially at points where Twain abruptly switches topics, helps the reader to get inside Twain's head and understand his intentions better. If all of the recollections of Twain's mother were included in one chapter and all of the recollections of his poverty were kept in a separate chapter, the book would have an entirely different feel.

Twain was known as a humorist and demonstrated a playful quality in most of his writings. This is evident throughout the book, in which he uses humorous phrases to describe situations, such as when wasps are crawling up the leg of a boy so stricken with shyness by some girls in the room that he cannot move. Twain describes the wasps as "prospecting around," and says that "one group of excursionists after another climbed up Jim's legs and resented even the slightest wince or squirm that he indulged himself with in his misery.

But Twain's humor also has a sharp edge to it when it is aimed at somebody else. He does this when he wants to vilify someone whom he feels has wronged him. For example, when explaining that Webster's business manager at the publishing company came from the same town as Webster and his lawyer, Twain says, "We got all our talents from that stud farm at Dunkirk.

By referring to the three young men who sink the business as "talents" who came from a "stud farm," Twain is suggesting just the opposite—that the men have no talent and they come from low stock. One of the reasons The Autobiography of Mark Twain continues to engage readers is its detailed, first-person account of the historical events of the time.

Twain lived during formative years in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when America was experiencing growing pains and defining its national identity. It is no surprise that Twain and his brother Orion were able to find work in the newspaper industry, which experienced rapid growth in the nineteenth century. This growth was due to a number of developments, including the increased use of advertising to subsidize printing costs, an increase in the number of news correspondents using the telegraph to wire in the latest national news, and the establishment of the Associated Press.

The importance of newspapers and other forms of rapid communication increased with the advent of the Civil War, when existing newspapers on both sides of the conflict promoted their cause in print. The Civil War was the single, bloodiest fight that America has ever experienced. From tomore than six hundred thousand Americans died in this war which pitted brother against brother—sometimes literally, as some families were divided in their loyalties to North and South.

Although the secession of the southern states from the Union started the war, divided views over slavery caused the South to secede. The South viewed the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in as a threat to its way of life—most notably the institution of slavery, which provided the massive labor force that fueled the lucrative southern cotton trade.

The majority of casualties in the war came from disease, which thrived among the troops on both sides. Second to disease as a cause of death in the war were battlefield injuries and a lack of medical knowledge, experience, and preparation.

Autobiography of mark twain theme of writing

Medicine in the nineteenth century was largely undeveloped, and medical education was not yet regulated. American physicians had, at this time, little knowledge of the cause and prevention of disease and infection. Even in cities, away from the crude setting of the battlefront, medicine was largely guesswork and people easily succumbed to many fatal and crippling illnesses.

In this autobiography, Twain gives some examples from his own experiences. His father gets caught out in a storm on a trip home and dies from pleurisy, an inflammation in the pleura due to a prolonged lung infection. Twain's wife falls on the ice when she is a teenager, and as a result is an invalid for the rest of her life. His brother, Henry, is given an overdose of morphine, which kills him.

In one of the most heart-wrenching passages of the book, Twain recalls his responsibility for the death of his first-born child, Langdon. Twain took his son out for a drive on a cold morning and forgot to check on him. He and the coachman wrap up the child again, but the effects of the cold proved fatal. As Resa Willis notes in her book, Mark and Livy, Langdon's death was "caused by diphtheria, the disease that took so many children in the nineteenth century and for which no antitoxin would be developed until To understand the critical reception of The Autobiography of Mark Twainone must examine the context in which all of the versions were created and released, the intentions of each editor, and the debate over the works that continues today.

Twain's autobiography, in the form that he intended it to be released, exists in the form of a massive, ,word typescript he created in the final years of his life. The manuscript is largely composed of nonchronological, freeform dictations that Twain made to Albert Bigelow Painehis official biographer, from until his death in During these dictations, Twain would say whatever came into his autobiography of mark twain theme of writing, mixing present and past events as he saw fit.

Says E. Hudson Long in his Mark Twain Handbook, "Mark's intentions were to make his autobiography a combination of daily diary and memories from the past, a contrast he believed would add interest. Twain assembled his dictations, along with other autobiographical writings from the past, into the typescript, which he continued to work on until his death.

It was not untilfourteen years after Twain's death, that Paine published a portion of the typescript as Mark Twain's Autobiography. Paine deliberately removed items from the work that he thought might be too controversial, in some cases instructed by the Twain estate to do so, but left the rest in the unconventional order of composition that Twain had intended rather than the true chronological order that most autobiographies follow.

This hybrid approach led to mixed reviews. As Charles Neider notes in the introduction to his version of Twain's autobiography, most reviewers commented negatively about the lack of order, although some critics found good things to say about the writing itself and criticized Paine for autobiography of mark twain theme of writing out some sections.

In Bernard DeVoto published his version of the autobiography, Mark Twain in Eruptionwhich left out all of the material from Paine's version, and only included part of the remaining manuscript. He edited his version heavily, imposing a thematic order on it that was directly contrary to Twain's intentions. He did, however, include some of the controversial items that Paine left out, which whetted critics' appetites.

Atlantic Monthly critic Robert M. Gay read the book eagerly, "half expecting to find a chamber of horrors. In it, I suspected, we should at last get to the bottom of Mark Twain's tragic mystery which we have heard so much about. In Neider tackled the typescript. Like DeVoto, Neider ignored Twain's original intentions and imposed his own views on how the autobiography should be organized.

Neider's version included some published material from the previous versions and some new selections from the typescript. Nation critic Kenneth Rexroth reviewed Neider's version with the same mixed feelings that the other two versions had received:. What is there to say about this book? It is a more coherent collection of Mark Twain's random reminiscences than the Paine or DeVoto volumes, but it omits some of the political and social criticism that DeVoto printed and that is certainly important to an understanding of Mark Twain.

Today: Americans unite in their support of the war on international terrorism, instigated by a terrorist act on September 11,that claimed the lives of several thousand Americans. This new kind of war relies heavily on behind-the-scenes intelligence efforts, and the use of military ground forces and air strikes. Today: Many Americans travel to all parts of the world for both work and pleasure.

The fastest form of commercial air travel, the supersonic Concorde, can travel at more than two thousand miles per hour. Today: Many celebrities find a wide audience for their ideas on television talk shows, and most have an agent or manager who books engagements for them. Twentieth-first century critics look forward to the publication of Twain's complete autobiographical typescript—disorganized structure, margin notes, and all—so that they can make their own estimations about whether or not Twain's idea to publish such an unconventional autobiography was a good one.

In his article, "Mark Twain and Collaborative Autobiography," Michael Kiskis argues that the time has come to stop relying on editors' interpretations and let Twain's entire version be published. Says Kiskis, "We should turn away from the seductive prospect of retelling his story by adjusting his words and return to the original materials to understand the complex process in which Clemens was engaged.

Poquette has a bachelor's degree in English and specializes in writing about literature. In the following essay, Poquette proposes a model for divining the truth in Twain's autobiography. How does one go about reading The Autobiography of Mark Twain? Noted by generations of critics and readers alike for its sprawling collection of experiences that lack an obvious structure, the work has also been studied with a historical microscope to determine what facts hold up under inspection.

Indeed, even while the bulk of the material was being dictated to Albert Bigelow Paine, the biographer himself had doubts as to its authenticity. As Michael Kiskis notes in his article, "Mark Twain and Collaborative Autobiography," "Paine came to believe that the material was infected by dramatization, a belief that drove a wedge between his work as biographer and Clemens's as autobiographer.

To some extent, this should have been expected, given Twain's profession. Twain was known for his "tall tales" in both his fictional works and semi-autobiographical travel works, and the tendency to embellish his life for the amusement of others was—by the time of the autobiographical dictations—instinct. Twain may not be alone in this instinct.

Speaking about autobiographies in general, Alvin P. Sanoff notes in his article "Autobiography and the Craft of Embellishment" that "scholars are now asking whether autobiographers actually bare their souls or whether their works are every bit as much a product of the imagination as a well-crafted novel. However, this does not necessarily mean that one should read Twain's autobiography with a history book or documented biography nearby, although some readers do.

Instead, a reader who wishes to understand the truth within the work should consider focusing on the particular qualities of the words themselves. Perhaps one of Twain's own quotes sums it up best. In an excerpt from a conversation to his friend, William Dean Howellsreproduced in Kaplan's book, Twain says "The remorseless truth is there, between the lines.

If reading between the lines is the trick to understanding the truth of Twain's autobiography, then there must be some formula, some focusing point, with which to view the work to find its subtext, or hidden meaning. Indeed, when one examines the situations in the book in light of their relative quality of humor, a possible formula presents itself.

Specifically, Twain uses three different levels of humor in his autobiography—mild humor, vicious humor, and the total lack of humor—all of which give an indication of how truthful the account is. When Twain uses mild humor, there is good reason to believe that he is embellishing the truth, if not manufacturing the entire story, telling the equivalent of a harmless white lie to benefit the narrative.

There are many examples of mild humor in the text. In the narrative, when Twain almost takes part in a duel, he acts like he is worried and says of his opponent, "If the duel had come off he would have so filled my skin with bullet holes that it wouldn't have held my principles. As Leland Krauth notes in his article "Mark Twain Fights Sam Clemens' Duel," "Clemens' challenges … were never accepted; there was no confrontation on the field of honor.

That does not mean, however, that other instances where Twain uses mild humor are totally false. For example, Kaplan notes that Twain's brother Orion does have a number of misadventures in real life, including the incident where he sneaks into the wrong house in the middle of the night and snuggles up against two old maids, whom he mistakes for his brothers.

Whether the maids actually screamed or whether Orion "was out of the bed and clawing around in the dark for his clothes in a fraction of a second," readers may never know, although it is likely that Twain embellished this part somewhat for greater effect. However, in other portrayals of Orion, Twain does not give the full story. In his narrative, Twain discusses how he gave Orion the task of writing down an autobiography in the style that he himself was planning.

He instructs Orion to "tell the straight truth in it," saying that "this had never been done," and that if Orion succeeded, "his autobiography would be a most valuable piece of literature. But when Twain recalls Orion's autobiography, he says, "great was my disappointment. This trend intensifies when Twain's humor turns dark and he becomes especially vicious towards others in his autobiography.

On these occasions, the facts would suggest that he is crafting a lie and attributing it to a autobiography of mark twain theme of writing to hide a fault of his own. The most notable examples from the book come from the discussion of Twain's relationship with his nephew-in-law Webster. From the start of his recollections about Webster, Twain fabricates the actual details.

In his account, he paints Webster as a vain, uneducated, and inexperienced man who eventually swindles Twain out of his business, picks up a drug habit, and mismanages the publishing business to its ruin. In reality, these claims are unfounded. The truth of the matter, as Kaplan notes, is that Twain completely tied himself up with the daily details for the publication of the General Grant book, which is the type of job that he hired Webster to do.

Largely due to this stress and the resulting health effects, Webster sold his share in the business and died an early death at the age of forty. This is a far cry from the story that Twain tells about Webster, but it makes sense why he makes up the tale. Twain cannot admit that it is his own mismanagement that makes his book business fail, and so he demonizes Webster to try to absolve his own guilt.

In Twain's version, Twain is the embattled underdog who has to deal with his nephew-inlaw's traitorous act and soldier on to regain financial solvency. Even when he does not have an audience, Twain is in such need to deny his own guilt that he maintains Webster has wronged him. Kaplan notes that until his death, Twain "held Webster responsible for every terrible thing that happened, including bankruptcy and the deaths of Susy and Livy.

Twain himself admits in the autobiography that his memory is failing, and that when he was younger, he could "remember anything, whether it happened or not. His hatred becomes an internal reality, which manifests itself in his excessive use of vicious humor at the expense of his nephew-in-law. On a similar note, Twain is most honest when describing tragic events that are totally devoid of humor, such as the accounts of the deaths of his daughter Susy and wife Olivia.

This fact is not lost on Twain's biographer. Says Kiskis, "As Paine came to realize the conflicting approaches, he drew a distinction between the materials related to Livy and Susy as being different from the other materials. A significant portion of Twain's autobiography is devoted to the death of his wife Olivia and two of his daughters, Susy and Jean.

In each of these tellings, Twain is notably moved. He goes on to say that "the intellect is stunned by the shock. Jean's death hits him so hard that he ends the book with it. There is no mistaking his tone when he recounts the death of this daughter. Humor is still absent, and the voice is one of a man in pain: "Possibly I know now what the soldier feels like when a bullet crashes through his heart.

Given the fact that Twain makes this statement in the last chapter in his book, which was also one of the last chapters that he dictated, it might be that this is Twain at his most honest. All of his playful humor is gone, and he is merely waiting for his own death, which he views as a "gift. Ryan D. In the following essay, Kiskis examines Twain's reliance on "collaborating"—trying his work out on family and friends—in his creative process, especially in the creation of his autobiography.

Our understanding of Mark Twain's creative process continues to be obscured by the complex myth that he, his heirs literary and legaland his critics have suggested and reinforced. It is a myth that has been fostered by Twain's own descriptions of his work habits, descriptions that have been too quickly accepted by critics as well as Twain enthusiasts.

The myth suggests that Twain avoided work, that he was not interested in the mechanics of composing beyond the accumulation of words and pages, and, perhaps most importantly, that his use of various editors Mary Fairbanks, Olivia Langdon Clemens, William Dean HowellsAlbert Bigelow Paine was based on a basic and one-way relationship. Twain composed, and then editors excised.

We are notoriously accepting of the Mark Twain persona that Samuel Clemens projected—the lazy and uninterested writer, the "jack-leg" writer who felt chained to the pen when he would much rather lounge and speculate on new business dealings. Samuel Clemens, however, the man behind the persona, promoted the image of the lazy and disinterested writer as part of his performance as Mark Twain.

Clemens's often stated reliance on his imaginative "well" has become legendary. He is dismissed as incapable of disciplined thought, and his seemingly passive acceptance of editorial advice is presented as a conscious attempt to use others to support his composing process. Recent critical work especially that of Victor Doyno in Writing Huck Finn and Laura Skandera-Trombley in Mark Twain in the Company of Women, an examination of Clemens's reliance on the women in his circle introduces us not to a passive and submissive Clemens but to a writer who courted intense personal and primary relationships in order to give tone and substance to his storytelling, both fiction and non-fiction.

While Clemens's sensitivity to his audience has long been accepted, this new work demonstrates how Clemens remained tuned to the needs of real readers throughout his creative process and how he adjusted his prose so that it would more effectively approach reader expectations. Most importantly, it demonstrates how he understood and made constant use of collaborative relationships and how he invited a range of opinion and a chorus of voices into his creative process as he struggled to give shape to his creations.

A primary critical focus on his relationships with various editors, censors, and advisors has been directed toward his fiction; however, collaboration also played a vital role in Clemens's approach to autobiography. An examination of Clemens's collaborative efforts at autobiography offers us a new and valuable insight into the creative approaches Clemens adopted early on and then reclaimed during the final years of his life.

It also offers us an important insight into his reliance on a variety of "editors" and the specific roles that succeeding editors would play in extending the life of the tales and manuscripts that Clemens bundled together as his autobiography. Clemens began to compose autobiography as early asbut he did not fully engage in the process of recollecting his past until late in when he was approached by Albert Bigelow Paine who proposed a formal and authorized biography.

During those thirty-five years, Clemens made brief and long-separated attempts at writing and dictating portions of autobiography which he would then set aside, feeling only an occasional impulse to return to the project but with no firm plan for an extended effort. Some of these fragments, it would appear, helped him to rehearse settings and tales for his fiction.

The early manuscripts written between and conform to the conventional approach to reflective writing in which the writer attempts to build a bridge to his past by examining episodes out of his prior experience. In Clemens's case, this meant creating sketches only several paragraphs long, a form with links to his talent for short, precise vignettes like those strung together in the chapters of The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, A Tramp Abroad, and even The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

In these sketches, he attempts to reclaim a sense of the contrast between his present and his past. Longer autobiographical fragments—the Grant Dictations of and the dictations begun in Florence during —were composed in the presence of a "shorthander" or stenographer. These later self-contained descriptions of Clemens's experiences are precursors of a form of collaboration Clemens would pursue more energetically in his autobiographical dictations of Clemens used the dictating sessions of and to record immediate ideas and impressions.

James Pond, Clemens's lecture agent, worked with him on the Grant material; Isabel Lyon, recently hired to help carry some of the weight of the household, took down Clemens's Florence observations. Neither of these attempts at working with an amanuensis was Clemens's first such attempt. The very notion of working with a stenographer appears quite early.

During his trip through England, Clemens wrote to Olivia: "If I could take notes of all I hear said, I should make a most interesting book—but of course these things are interminable—only a shorthand reporter could seize them. Thompson, a theological student, to accompany him to England and to keep notes and records of the trip; in he hired Roswell H.

Phelps, a stenographer for the Continental Life Insurance Company of Hartford, to accompany him during his tour of the Mississippi River, although Phelps would not complete the trip. Clemens also dictated portions of The American Claimant and even toyed with the idea of dictating onto wax cylinders as a way to increase his output. While these events demonstrate Clemens's interest in dictating as one method of composing, they hardly suggest collaboration.

The early experiences with Thompson, Phelps, and Pond do not suggest any attempt to share the work of composition. They were there to take down notes and ideas and reactions, not to take an active role in composing text. In Phelps's case, Clemens used dictated material much later when he wrote Life on the Mississippi.