[文学]美国文学课件 Mark Twain.ppt

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 called it a “villainous backwoods未开垦的，偏僻森林地带 sketch”) that he heard in a mining camp not 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 and lecturer was worldwide, and he had become one of the most celebrated American of his day. “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” as his frog story was later titled, was one of the many tall tales 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 printer. A brief but glorious career as a Mississippi River steamboat pilot ended when the river was blockaded at the beginning of the Civil War, and after a short term of soldiering as a Confederate volunteer, Twain went to Nevada, hoping to strike it rich in the silver 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 to literature of a low order—i.e. humorous.” He took with him a reputation as “the wild humorist of the Pacific Slope” and a lively 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 confrontations with the cultural and religious shrines of Europe and the Holy L