Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
—Notice at the opening of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
America doesn’t have a national holiday to honor a writer. But if we did, maybe it should be one devoted to Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born in Missouri on November 30, 1835. And maybe we could make it today, February 18, in honor of Huck Finn.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appeared in America on this date in 1885. (It had been published first in London a few months before.) An excellent website devoted to “Huck” and Twain can be found at the University of Virginia’s site:
http://etext.virginia.edu/twain/huckfinn.html
http://etext.virginia.edu/twain/huckfinn.html
(Writers take note of some of the reviews. They were not gentle.)
Best known by his pen name, and often viewed as the creator of such young adult classics as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Prince and the Pauper, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain was much more. In a distinctly American style, Twain wrote biting satire that poked fun at America’s manners and corrupt politics. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), his master work, is now a controversial classic.
But Twain would surely remind people that he once said that a classic is, “A book which people praise and don’t read.” Although he famously told a newspaper in 1897, “The report of my death was an exaggeration,” Twain in fact died in 1910. What else do you know about one of America’s greatest writers? Take this quick quiz (adapted from Don’t Know Much About Anything Else.)
1. Where did he get his pen name “Mark Twain”?
2. How did Twain serve during the Civil War?
3. What short story gave Twain his national fame?
4. Which famous general’s autobiography did Twain publish?
There are two biographies of Mark Twain I would highly recommend:
Mark Twain: A Life by Ron Powers
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography by Justin Kaplan
Answers
1. As a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, he knew this phrase meant that the water is two fathoms (12 feet) deep.
2. In 1861, Clemens joined a group of irregular Confederate cavalry from Missouri, deserting after a few weeks time. The experience served as the source of a short memoir, “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed.”
3. “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865), based on a tale Twain heard while working in the California gold fields, was a national sensation.
4. His firm, Charles L. Webster, published Ulysses S. Grant’s Memoirs, a critical and commercial success.
