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Life on the Mississippi (excerpt) Mark Twain (1835-1910) (Life on the Mississippi and “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”) p. 574: Although Mark Twain is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers, the world-renowned author once indicated that he would have preferred to spend his life as a Mississippi riverboat pilot. The comment was probably not entirely serious, but Twain so loved life on the river that as a young man, he did in fact work as a riverboat pilot for several years. His childhood on the banks of the Mississippi fostered more than a love of riverboats—it also became the basis for many of his most famous works, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Life on the River Twain, whose given name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, felt so closely tied to the Mississippi River that he even took his pen name, Mark Twain, from a river man’s call meaning “two fathoms* deep,” indicating that the river is deep enough for a boat to pass safely. He grew up in the Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Missouri. His father died when he was eleven, and he left school to become a printer’s apprentice. He worked as a printer in a number of different cities before deciding at age twenty-one to pursue a career as a riverboat pilot. (*vocab alert!) A Traveling Man When the Civil War closed traffic on the Mississippi, Twain went west to Nevada. There, he supported himself as a journalist and lecturer, developing the entertaining writing style that made him famous. In 1865, Twain published “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” his version a tall tale he had heard in a mining camp in California while he was working as a gold prospector. The story made him an international celebrity. Following the publication of The Innocents Abroad (1869), a successful book of humorous travel letters, Twain moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where he was to make his home for the rest of his life. There, Twain began using his past experiences as raw material for his books. He drew on his travels in the western mining region for Roughing It (1872). He turned to his childhood experiences on the Mississippi for The Adventures of Tome Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, and his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. A Restless Soul Twain traveled widely throughout his life, including residential stints in major American cities as St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and San Francisco. He made extended visits to England, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Palestine. His adventures, both at home and abroad, were fuel for a number of books. After living in Europe for several years, he returned home with his family. Following the death of his wife and three of their four children, Twain was unable to reproduce the balance between pessimism and humor that he had captured so brilliantly in Huckleberry Finn. In his later works, such as A Connecticut in King Arthur’s Court (1899), Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), and The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900), Twain’s writing depicted an increasingly pessimistic view of society and human nature. However, he continued to display the same masterful command of language that had already established him as one of America’s finest fiction writers. p. 575: Connecting to the Literature Today’s world is being transformed through almost daily advances in technology. During Twain’s day, America was also changing quickly as new forms of transportation helped settlers venture across the expanding frontier. Life on the Mississippi (excerpt) Literary Analysis (*Don’t skip this!!*) Humor Humor is writing intended to evoke laughter. Humorists use a variety of techniques to make their work amusing. Many western humorists of the 1800s perfected these comic techniques: • Exaggerating and embellishing incidents to build comedy • Using a narrator or storyteller who takes a serious tone, adding humor by suggesting that the teller of the tale is unaware of its ridiculous qualities As you read, take note of the details in these selections [Life on the Mississippi and “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” which is due next week] that make the stories humorous. Comparing Literary Works As these two selections demonstrate, Twain could find humor in any subject. However, instead of always writing just to get a laugh, he used humor for a variety of purposes. One of these pieces is set in a California gold rush town, and the story is deliberately funny. In the other, set on the Mississippi River, humor is secondary to the writer’s goal of describing a place and a way of life. As you read, determine whether the ideas each selection conveys are serious or not. Then consider the ways in which humor provides a vehicle for these ideas. Understanding Regional Dialect Much of the humor in Twain’s writing comes from his colorful uses of language. Twain was a master at re-creating regional dialect – language specific to a particular area of the country. If you read unfamiliar words aloud, you will find that they are regional pronunciations of words you already know. excerpt from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain (textbook pages 577-580) p. 577: ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Background Mark Twain was an eyewitness to the nineteenth-century expansion of the western frontier. He was a young man when wagon trains left his home state of Missouri to cross the prairies, and he later saw the transcontinental railroad built. He traveled throughout the growing nation, working first on the Mississippi and then in the West, before settling in Connecticut. The rich variety of people and places he observed is reflected in the setting, characters, and dialogue of his uniquely American literature. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ “The Boys’ Ambition” (from Life on the Mississippi) When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village1 on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. _____________________________________________ 1. our village Hannibal, Missouri transient adj. not permanent Life on the Mississippi (excerpt) When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first Negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained. Once a day, a cheap, gaudy packet2 arrived upward from St. Louis, and another downward from Keokuk3. Before these events, the day was glorious with expectancy; after them, the day was a dead and empty thing. Not only the boys, but the whole village, felt this. After all these years I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so; one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water Street stores, with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall, chins on breasts, hats slouched over their faces, asleep—with shingle shavings enough around to show what broke them down; a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along two or three lonely little freight piles scattered about the levee; 4 a pile of skids5 on the slope of the stone-paved wharf, and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in the shadow of them; two or three wood flats6 at the head of the wharf, but nobody to listen to the peaceful lapping of the wavelets against them; the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in [p. 578] the sun; the dense forest away on the other side; the point above the town, and the point below, bounding the river-glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one. Presently a film of dark smoke appears above one of those remote points; instantly a Negro drayman, 7 famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice, lifts up the cry, “S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin’!” and the scene changes! The town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious clatter of drays follows, every house and store pours out a human contribution, and all in a twinkling the dead town is alive and moving. Drays, carts, men, boys, all go hurrying from many quarters to a common center, the wharf. Assembled there, the people fasten their eyes upon the coming boat as upon a wonder they are seeing for the first time. And the boat is rather a handsome sight, too. She is long and sharp and trim and pretty; she has two tall, fancy-topped chimneys, with a gilded device of some kind swung between them; a fanciful pilothouse, all glass and gingerbread, perched on top of the texas deck8 behind them; the paddleboxes are gorgeous with a picture or with gilded rays above the boat’s name; the boiler deck, the hurricane deck, and the texas deck are fenced and ornamented with clean white railings; there is a flag gallantly flying from the jackstaff; 9 the furnace doors are open and fires glaring bravely; the upper decks are black with passengers; the captain stands by the big bell, calm, imposing, the envy of all; great volumes of the blackest smoke are the rolling and tumbling out of the chimneys—a husbanded grandeur created with a ____________________________________________________________________ 2.

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