Riassunto esame Letteratura Angloamericana 2, professor Martinez, libro consigliato "Norton Anthology"

Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) 1835-1910

Samuel Langhome Clemens, the third of five children, was born on November 30, 1835, in the village of Florida, Missouri, and grew up in the somewhat larger river town of Hannibal, that mixture of idyll and nightmare he called St. Petersburg, in and around which his two most famous characters, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, live out their adventure-filled, seemingly endless summers. Clemens’s father, an ambitious and respected but unsuccessful country lawyer and storekeeper, died when Clemens was twelve, and from that time on Clemens worked to support himself and the rest of the family.

Clemens was apprenticed to a printer after his father’s death; and in 1851, when his brother Orion became a publisher in Hannibal, Clemens went to work for him. In 1853 he began a three-year period of travel, which took him to St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Keokuk (Iowa), and Cincinnati, in each of which he earned his living as a printer hired by the day. In 1856 he set out by steamboat for New Orleans, intending to go to the Amazon; the scheme fell through, and instead he apprenticed himself to Horace Bixby, a Mississippi riverboat pilot. After training for eighteen months, Clemens satisfied a boyhood ambition when he became a pilot himself, practicing this lucrative and prestigious trade until the Civil War virtually ended commercial river traffic in 1861.

During this period, he began to write humorous accounts of his activities for the Keokuk Saturday Post; though only three of these articles were published (under the pseudonym Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass), they established the pattern of peripatetic journalism—the pattern for much of his next ten years.

Early career and travels

After brief service in an unorganized Confederate militia (Missouri was a state in which slavery was legal but that did not actually join the Confederacy), Clemens made the first of the trips that would take him farther west and toward his ultimate careers as humorist, lecturer, journalist, and author. In 1861, he accompanied Orion to the Nevada Territory, to which the latter had been appointed secretary (chief record keeper for the territorial government) by President Lincoln. In Roughing It, written a decade later, Clemens told of the brothers’ adventures on the way to Carson City and of the various unsuccessful schemes that, once there, Sam devised for getting rich quick on timber and silver.

Soon Clemens was once again writing for newspapers, first for the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City and then, after 1864, for the Californian. The fashion of the time called for a pen name, and Clemens used "Mark Twain," a term from his piloting days signifying "two fathoms deep" or "safe water." Twain’s early writing was largely imitative of the humorous journalism of the time and is important chiefly as an apprenticeship. No less important than his journalistic writing during these years were three friendships with the writer Bret Harte, the famous professional lecturer Artemus Ward, and the obscure amateur raconteur Jim Gillis. Twain owed his earliest national audience and critical recognition to his performances as lecturer and to his skillful retelling of a well-known tall tale, "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," first published in 1865.

Writing and lecturing

In this same year Twain signed with the Sacramento Union to write a series of letters covering the newly opened steamboat passenger service between San Francisco and Honolulu. These letters used a fictitious character, Mr. Brown, to present inelegant ideas, attitudes, and information, sometimes in impolite language. In this series Twain discovered that he could say almost anything he wanted, provided he could convincingly claim that he was simply reporting what others said and did. The refinement of this technique—a written equivalent of "deadpan" lecturing—which allowed his fantasy a long leash and yet required him to anchor it in the circumstantial details of time and place, was to be Twain’s major technical accomplishment of the next two decades, the period of his best work.

The first book of this period, and still one of Twain’s most popular, was Innocents Abroad (1869). It consists of a revised form of letters that Twain wrote for the Alta California and the New York Tribune during his 1867 excursion on the Quaker City to the Mediterranean and the Holy Land. The letters were enormously popular, not only because they were exuberantly funny but also because the satire they leveled against a pretentious, decadent, and undemocratic Old World was especially relished by a young country about to enter a period of explosive economic growth, political consolidation, and by the turn the century imperialist expansion.

Influence of Mississippi boyhood

It would be hard to exaggerate how deep the rich material Twain’s Mississippi boyhood ran in his memory and imagination. To get to it, Twain had, in effect, to work chronologically backward and psychically inward. He made a tentative probe of this material as early as 1870 in an early version of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer called A Boy’s Manuscript. But it was not until 1875, when he wrote Old Times on the Mississippi in seven installments of the Atlantic Monthly (edited by his lifelong friend W. D. Howells), that Twain arrived at the place his deepest imagination called home.

In this work, an account of Twain’s apprenticeship to the pilot Horace Bixby, he evokes not only "the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun" but also his most intimate ties to the life on its surface and shores. These sketches were later incorporated into Life on the Mississippi (1883), written after Twain took a month-long steamboat trip on the Mississippi, stopping along the way to visit Hannibal. The added material – part history, part memoir, part travelogue – offers, among other things, a scathing critique of the southern romanticism Twain believed had made the Civil War inevitable.

Marriage and influence on writing

In writing "Old Times" Twain had returned imaginatively to the Hannibal of his youth; but before he could realize the deepest potential of this material he would have to put aside the psychological inhibitions that his newly acquired social respectability (after his marriage to Olivia Langdon in 1870) and his increasing fascination with great wealth may have helped to create. This he was able to do in part in the perennially popular The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), in which different aspects of Twain the man are divided between its two most memorable characters—the entrepreneurial Tom and his somewhat disreputable friend Huck Finn. In this narrative, Twain creates a compelling myth of the endless summer of childhood pleasures mingled with the violence, terror, and death; that lurk at the edges of the village. Its publication established Twain as a popular writer of fiction.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Twain began Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1876 and, after several stops and starts, completed it in 1883. In recent years the racial (and racist) implications of every aspect of the novel have become subjects of critical debate, as have questions about the racial beliefs of its author. In any event, Huck Finn has enjoyed extraordinary popularity since its publication more than one hundred years ago. Its unpretentious, colloquial, yet poetic style, its wide-ranging humor, its embodiment of the enduring and widely shared dream of innocence and freedom, and its recording of a vanished way of life in the pre-Civil War Mississippi Valley have instructed and moved people of all ages and conditions all over the world. (It sold fifty-one thousand copies in its first fourteen months compared to Tom Sawyer’s twenty-five thousand in the same period).

Later works and themes

Though Twain made a number of attempts to return to the characters, themes, settings, and points of view of Tom and Huck, "Old Times," Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn had for the time being exhausted the rich themes of river and boyhood. Twain would live to write successful—even memorable—books. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) among them. Like Huck Finn, these two works have been the subject of fresh interrogation with respect to issues of race, class, and gender embedded in their narratives.

The former work, a mélange of genres, but perhaps most conveniently described as a satirical fantasy, tells the story of a late-nineteenth-century master mechanic, Hank Morgan, who is transported back in time to sixth-century England, where he tries to "introduce," in Twain’s words, the "great and beneficent civilization of the nineteenth century" into the chivalric but decidedly undemocratic world of Camelot. The ironic use of "great and beneficent" to characterize a time and place dubbed "The Gilded Age" by Twain suggests that the lance he aimed at King Arthur had not one but two sharp ends.

Pudd’nhead Wilson, set in the 1830s, centers on the switching of two babies born on the same day—one the result of miscegenation, the other the legitimate son of a white slave owner. Even more than in Connecticut Yankee, a determinism that denies individuals the capacity to overcome their environmental conditioning makes itself felt. The book reveals the disastrous effects of slavery on victims and victimizers alike—the unearned pride of whites and the undeserved self-hate of slaves. The way in which Twain portrays the twinning of law and custom in sustaining the institution of slavery (like other aspects of this book full of doublings) indicates Twain’s despair over the prospects for true racial equality, a despair supported by the terrible facts of Jim Crow laws and the escalation of lynchings in the post-Reconstruction period in which the novel was conceived and published. Visible beneath the tragic ironies and droll maxims at the head of each chapter is Twain’s contempt for what he would soon regularly refer to as the "damned human race."

Later life and legacy

In the decade after Pudd'nhead was published, Twain experienced a series of calamitous events. Suddenly, his health was broken; his speculative investments in such enterprises as the Paige typesetting machine bankrupted him in the panic of 1893; his youngest daughter, Jean, was diagnosed as an epileptic; his oldest daughter, Susy, died of meningitis while he and his wife, Livy, were in Europe; and Livy began her decline into permanent invalidism. Twain’s grief for a time threatened his own sanity. For several years writing became both agonized labor and necessary therapy. The results of these circumstances were a dull book, Following the Equator (1897), which records Twain’s round-the-world lecture tour undertaken to pay off debts; a sardonically preachy story, "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" (1900); an embittered treatise on humanity’s foibles, follies, and venality, "What Is Man?" (1906); and the bleakly despairing The Mysterious Stranger, first published in an abridged version by Albert Bigelow Paine in 1916. Scholars continue to study the large bulk of Twain’s unfinished (and, until recently, unpublished) work, and such revisionist critics as Carl Dolmetsch have called for a reconsideration of Twain’s creativity and writing in the decade after 1895.

Despite these personal setbacks, Twain in his last years became a revered public institution; his opinions were sought by the press on every subject of general interest. Though his views on many of these subjects—political, military, and social—were often acerbic, it was only to his best friends—who understood the complex roots of his despair and anger at the human race in general—that he confessed the depth of his disillusionment. Much of this bitterness nonetheless informs such published works as "To a Person Sitting in Darkness" (1901), "The United States of Lyncherdom" (1901), and "King Leopold’s Soliloquy" (1905) as well as many other writings unpublished in his lifetime.

Early and late Twain maintained his magical power with language. What he said of one of his characters is a large part of his permanent appeal: "He could curl his tongue around the bulliest words in the language when he was a mind to, and lay them before you without a jint started, anywheres." His love of language informs his hilarious attack on the novels of James Fenimore Cooper in "Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences" (printed here). As his friend Howells observed, he was unlike any of his contemporaries in American letters: "Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes—I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Twain was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature."

The editor is indebted to Frederick Anderson, late editor of the Mark Twain Papers at the Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley, for textual advice and general counsel in preparing the Twain materials.

Ambrose Bierce 1842-1914?

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was born on June 24, 1842, in Meigs County, Ohio, the last of nine children of strongly religious parents. He led an unhappy childhood, and as an adult he cut himself off from his parents and all but one of his brothers and sisters. Perhaps his fascination with the supernatural in his fiction is similarly an attempt to escape the ordinary society of humanity he observed closely and claimed to detest. In any case, from his earliest days "Bitter Bierce," as he came to be called, seemed disappointed with what had been, displeased with his present condition, and pessimistic about what lay ahead.

Not long after he had spent one year at a military academy in Kentucky—his only formal schooling—the Civil War broke out and Bierce volunteered for the Union Army. He was involved in several battles and was mustered out a lieutenant. Bierce later defined war (in his Devil's Dictionary) as a "by-product of the arts of peace" and peace as "a period of cheating between two periods of fighting," and it is hard to accept his own testimony that, even while a soldier, he had been a zealous military man. The Civil War experience, however, was an important source of some of his best fiction, including the suspenseful "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge."

Life in San Francisco

After the war, Bierce moved to San Francisco. By 1866 he had secured a job as a journalist, the career he pursued for the rest of his life. He began as a columnist for the News Letter and in 1868 became its editor. Among his writer friends in San Francisco were Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, and George Sterling, all of whom were involved as journalists, lecturers, and writers in establishing San Francisco as a literary center.

Bierce married in 1872 and with his wife traveled to England, where they lived until 1876. There, under the influence of literary sophisticates such as George Augustus Sala and Thomas Hood, he developed from a crude western humorist into a satirist of elegance and bite. His best early work appeared in the "Prattler" column written first for the Argonaut (1877-79) and then for the Wasp until 1886. In that year the popular column was picked up by William Randolph Hearst's San Francisco Sunday Examiner, where it continued until 1896. A mixture of reviews, gossip, and political and social commentary, the "Prattler" also served as outlet for a number of Bierce’s best short stories.

Personal life and legacy

Bierce’s personal life was a series of disasters. His definition of marriage—"the state or condition of a community consisting of a master, a mistress, and two slaves, making in all, two"—reflected his views on his own marriage (which ended in divorce in 1891). In 1889 his elder son was shot to death during a fight over a girl; in 1901 his younger son died of alcoholism. In 1913, Bierce himself went to Mexico and disappeared without a trace, although there is a story that he was killed in the revolutionary war, which pitted Pancho Villa and Venustiano Carranza against General Victoriano Huerta.

Bierce’s pessimism, cynicism, nihilism, and gallows humor are in the American tradition of naysaying, which runs from Herman Melville to Thomas Pynchon. It is not the mordant wit of The Devils Dictionary (first published in 1906 as The Cynic’s Word Book) or Bierce’s penchant for the grotesque, however; that finally makes him significant. In his best work, such as Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891; later retitled In the Midst of Life), Bierce, like Stephen Crane and Ernest Hemingway after him, converted the disordered experience of war into resonant and dramatic fictional revelations.

Henry James 1843-1916

As a young man Henry James set out to be a "literary master" in the European sense. Even though his intricate style and choice, in his fiction, of highly cultivated characters ran counter to the vernacular tradition popularized by Mark Twain, James attracted, in his own lifetime, a select company of admirers and made a good living from his writings, though they never made him rich. These writings, the product of more than half a century as a publishing author, include tales, novellas, novels, plays, autobiographies, criticism, travel pieces, letters, reviews, and biographies—altogether perhaps, as much as one hundred volumes, a prodigious output even by late-nineteenth-century standards.

The recognition of his intrinsic importance as well as his wide influence as novelist and critic increased in the years, between the world wars, when American literary taste reached a new level of sophistication. James is now firmly established as one of America’s major novelists and critics, as a subtle psychological realist, and as an unsurpassed literary stylist and craftsman.

Henry James was born in New York City on April 15, 1843. His father was an eccentric, independently wealthy philosopher and religious visionary; his slightly older brother, William, was the first notable American psychologist and perhaps our country's most influential philosopher; two younger brothers and a sister, Alice, herself a perceptive observer and diarist, completed this remarkable American family.

First taken to Europe as an infant, James spe