Mark Twain

Thesis Statement

The paper aims to prove that Mark Twain deserved to be included in the American literary canon. The paper argues the importance of his work for giving him such a title.

Introduction

Mark Twain is best known as the author of the American novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). His original name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He was born in 1835 and died in 1910. He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri. He did many other jobs such as apprenticed printer, typesetter, master riverboat pilot, gold mining and journalism. Instead, he achieved success in writing and public speaking. For over a century, America's most beloved author had been entertaining, instructing, and humorously fining readers around the world. He was known for his writing and speaking. He wasn't financially well enough. Though he earned well, but, he spent mostly on various ventures. He was called the greatest American humorist of his age (Emerson, 218).

Literary Analysis

An adventure of Huckleberry Finn is in many ways not only Twain's finest work but also his most representative work. He had a little say in the history of mystery and detective fiction. Twain, however, demonstrated deep interest in particular literary forms over the course of his entire career. From the inquest in “Petrified Man” to his purest and most complete venture into the field, Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896), he adapted the conventions of these literary subgenres to his own purposes, aesthetic, and financial needs. His forays into mystery and detective fiction may therefore, best be classified according to form and function. His work ridicule certain social conditions, capitalizing on already popular (and therefore, potentially profitable) literary formulas, and finding an appropriate vehicle for those melodramatic climaxes of which he was perhaps over fond (Camfield, 665). He was a writer who generally wrote without any plan in mind and whose episodic works often appear innocent of both plot and structure. The formal constraints of detective and mystery writing often proved too confining for Twain. However, for a writer obsessed with the question of mistaken identity, mystery and detective fiction held a certain attraction. Indeed, mistaken identity plays a central role in his published short story A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage (2001). This story can be best seen as a parody of detective fiction.

Analysis

As Mark Twain explains in his essay “How to Tell a Story”, the art of the humorous tale relies more on how a story is told discussing its manner rather matter. This distinction is clear nowhere than in the Twain stories that depend heavily on mystery and detection, in which these literary forms meet Twain's particular use of southwestern humor and the oral tradition. In “A Ghost Story,” for example, particularly the clumsy ghost of a petrified man, Cardiff Giant, learnt from the narrator that he had been mistakenly haunting a plaster cast of himself in New York display. Instead, he should have been petrifying the figure on exhibit in Albany (Lauber, 115).

The reason why Mark Twain is included in the authors of American ...