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The object of our work is Mark Twain. In this course paper the writer is examined as a master of short story. The subject is his works and his style of writing.
Compositional structure of our work consists of four major parts - Introduction, Main part, Conclusion, and List of used literature. The brief content of each part is to be presented for your attention.
The work is subdivided the introductory material into two sections. The first section gives some brief characteristics of the work, its aims and tasks, problems and methods of investigation. The second section reveals common biographic milestones of Mark Twain, which were significant for the subject matter of theme. The main part includes two chapters. The first one divided into two items and the second chapter has three items. Each item reveals the concrete problem. In the first item of chapter 1 we wrote about Twain‘s enormous contribution to literature of his country. The second item describes Mark Twain as a writer of short stories. In chapter 2 the first item demonstrates the backgrounds and themes of his short stories. The second item we took into consideration Mark Twain‘s humor and satire which are used in his works especially in short stories. The last, third, item of chapter 2 is devoted to analysis of three short stories by Mark Twain: ―The
Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras Country‖, ―The Man That Corrupted
Hadleyburg‖, ―The Invalid‘s Story‖.
In the conclusion there are given some notes concerning the literary significance of Twain's works, their novelty and actuality for modern readers. The course paper contains the bibliography, which mentions the list of literature used in the frame of my work.
Some say the way you read Mark Twain depends on the way you see America. How did Twain himself see it? In many ways he was its booster.
Roughing It, a story of fortune hunting in the Nevada territories, is a vindication of the quality of American enterprise. Twain marvels at the country's natural beauty and the daring of the Pony Express riders. He also includes copious examples of the new frontier dialect, advertising America's new way of living and speaking. A believer in capitalism and free enterprise, he peppered his vocabulary with the language of entrepreneurship. Somewhat unnervingly, he referred to The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as "capital," so confident was he of its commercial potential.
In other respects, however, Twain had serious concerns about the direction his country was taking. Between the lines of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, he displays misgivings about whether the American dream of progress isn't really an apocalyptic nightmare vision, complete with smoke-belching factories and warfare waged with land mines and Gatling guns.
In addition, Twain's travels through the British Empire, and the outcome of American intervention in the Philippines, made him increasingly cynical about America's role abroad. Many of his anti-imperialist works remained unpublished during his life.
Twain died as a widely beloved figure. But he himself once wrote: "Everyone is a moon and has a dark side that he never shows to anybody."
In his private life, Samuel Clemens struggled with doubt, disappointment, despair, and an increasing misanthropy that was greater than any contained in his most sarcastic satires. Even his closest friends almost lost patience with his rantings on how to exterminate what he called "the damned human race."
Dr. Railton explores in some detail the unpublished manuscripts, discovered after his death, that reveal the dark and despairing side of Mark Twain. They include such partly completed works as The Enchanted Sea Wilderness, The Great Dark, and Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes.
These writings identify the issues Twain struggled with in his later years, but they do not detract from his legacy.
Twain was fond of comparing himself to Halley's Comet: He was born during its appearance in 1835 and believed he would die when it next appeared in 1910.
And he did. In many ways, he was just as rare and just as brilliant.
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