31 dic 1834 anni - Mark Twain is born

Descrizione:

'The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow.' M.Twain

Born SAMUEL CLEMENS in Missouri, the town of his childhood - idealised hometown.
Connecticut home- big house built for his wife and kids. yet heatbreak fould him nonetheless.
Long life.

Father - small merchant and slave owner, bad business. Twain never saw him laughed.
Mother - Presbyterian, told stories to their children.
Constantly moving: Missouri - Mississipi
Wanderer: St Luis, NY, Philly, New Orleans...

-Printer's apprentice,
- Riverboat pilot (realized how difficult the job was, from that experience he got his alter ego name: Mark Twain = safe water to sail a boat in a river in terms of depth) ,
-Gold prospector who never struck gold,
- Confederate soldier who never fought a battle

Considered the funniest man on earth who could entertain almost anybody.
A spectacularly inept businessman, whose countless schemes to get rich quick threatened him constantly to bring him to ruin.

Above all, Mark Twain was a writer, NATURAL-BORN STORYTELLER, and a self taught genius with words. Genius for speaking the voices of America, without prior reference, jut telling what he ran into.
He idealised the American language, he used the way we talk (VERNACULAR LANGUAGE) and turned it into literature.

Was read by millions.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Became the best loved of all Twain's books, a celebration of a small town American boyhood, in which the hero solves a murder mystery, manages to eavesdrop on his own funeral and tricks his friends into painting his fences. Inspired in his own life experiences and people's encounters and stories.


The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
Huck Finn is set before the civil war and before emancipation. It's the story of two runaways, Huck Finn (a white boy) and a Jim, a black man who was running away from slavery. Mark Twain is able to take a black person and make them a human being by putting the two characters know each other: turns upside down what Huck has been taught about black people, slavery and freedom, good and evil.
His masterpiece. It took more that 10 years to publish since it run into difficulty, it was no longer a continuation of Tom Sawyer but the question of slave and race brought a new kind of story.
Twain liberated America with Huck Finn: he cut loose from any of the conventions of the literary time and its elegant speech.
YET, unlike Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn did not get unanimous reviews. In some areas it was banned even: not for the issue of slavery and race but rather because of its language, grammar and literary style labeled as "rubish".

TOPICS:

- RACE: Twain looks at race right in the face and makes it central to his novel, unlike any other author before him. Black voices were the norm for him, before he understood they were differences. They were the first voices of his youth, and the most powerful and metaphorical storytelling voices of his early childhood. Slaves songs and fairytales.

- SLAVERY: With Huck Finn, Twain demystified it, demythologised it and took the romanticism out of it. The context of slavery is present throughout his life: earliest memory "the saddest faces I've ever saw" from a group of chained slaves being carried down the diver to be sold to the market. / His high socity living alongside his friendship with his house cook and other freed African Americans./

- HUMOUR: storytelling and interactions taken from the mundane, filled with jokes. It's all about the manner of telling the story and that story is taken from the oral langue.

- MISSISSIPI (Annabelle): source of inspiration, lots of childhood memories: rural town games, river, pranks, fishing, smoking corn pipes, inventing pranks, mischievous adventures, forming friendships... PLACE as the childhood eden, an eternal summer.

- STEAMBOAT: his school, everywhere he went he stored memories of places and people. A remarkable observer and noticer. The steamboat was for him what the whaleboat was for Mellville.

-CIVIL WAR: War stopped the Mississipi sailboat business.

- VERNACULAR LANGUAGE: How much power a vernacular storyteller could exercise over his/her listeners. Huck Finn does not talk like Capitan Aheb or Hester Payne. Twain lets Huck Finn (vulgar illiterate uneducated juvenilia delinquent) tell the story without an apology of any sort. That voice was the beginning of an authentic voice.

-MASTER OF WRITING: Oceans of writing and meticulous craftsman of sentences. Stripped down the English language, clearing it of ornamentation and making it more oral.

- CONSTANT MOVE: From S to N and E to S. Explorer and adventurer.

-DIVIDED PERSONALITY: making fun of the mighty (the monymakers of whoat he labeled the guided age) but at the same thime he wanted to be the mighty (his pompous house)

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