What kind of writer was twain

He said Twain didn't sound like any other American writer although certainly other writers of the era such as Sarah Orne Jewett and William Dean Howells also worked in a realistic style.

However, many writers that followed Twain have acknowledged his influence on their writing styles. Faulkner himself acknowledged the influence, calling Twain the "father of American literature" Buffy Naillon has worked in the media industry since , contributing to Germany's "Der Spiegel" magazine and various websites. She received a bachelor's degree in German from Boise State University. Naillon also attended New York University and participated in the foreign exchange program at Germany's Saarland University.

She is completing her master's degree in educational technology at Boise State. American Writers in the Early s. American Writers in the Roaring '20s. New Historicist Lens. Thematic Trends. Writing Style. Other Works. Works Cited. Image from: Tumblr. The raw, uneducated vernacular of the people of St. Petersburg can be convoluted and full of slang that it is difficult to understand. But nothing panned out, and by the middle of , he was flat broke and in need of a regular job.

Twain knew his way around a newspaper office, so that September, he went to work as a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. He churned out news stories, editorials and sketches, and along the way adopted the pen name Mark Twain — steamboat slang for 12 feet of water.

Twain became one of the best-known storytellers in the West. He honed a distinctive narrative style — friendly, funny, irreverent, often satirical and always eager to deflate the pretentious.

He got a big break in , when one of his tales about life in a mining camp, "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," was printed in newspapers and magazines around the country the story later appeared under various titles.

His next step up the ladder of success came in , when he took a five-month sea cruise in the Mediterranean, writing humorously about the sights for American newspapers with an eye toward getting a book out of the trip. At 34, this handsome, red-haired, affable, canny, egocentric and ambitious journalist and traveler had become one of the most popular and famous writers in America.

However, Twain worried about being a Westerner. In those years, the country's cultural life was dictated by an Eastern establishment centered in New York City and Boston — a straight-laced, Victorian , moneyed group that cowed Twain. Twain's fervent wish was to get rich, support his mother, rise socially and receive what he called "the respectful regard of a high Eastern civilization.

In February , he improved his social status by marrying year-old Olivia Livy Langdon, the daughter of a rich New York coal merchant. Writing to a friend shortly after his wedding, Twain could not believe his good luck: "I have Livy, like many people during that time, took pride in her pious, high-minded, genteel approach to life. Twain hoped that she would "reform" him, a mere humorist, from his rustic ways. The couple settled in Buffalo and later had four children.

Thankfully, Twain's glorious "low-minded" Western voice broke through on occasion. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published in , and soon thereafter he began writing a sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Writing this work, commented biographer Everett Emerson, freed Twain temporarily from the "inhibitions of the culture he had chosen to embrace. Hemingway's comment refers specifically to the colloquial language of Twain's masterpiece, as for perhaps the first time in America, the vivid, raw, not-so-respectable voice of the common folk was used to create great literature.

Huck Finn required years to conceptualize and write, and Twain often put it aside. In the meantime, he pursued respectability with the publication of The Prince and the Pauper , a charming novel endorsed with enthusiasm by his genteel family and friends.

In he put out Life on the Mississippi , an interesting but safe travel book. When Huck Finn finally was published in , Livy gave it a chilly reception. After that, business and writing were of equal value to Twain as he set about his cardinal task of earning a lot of money. In , he triumphed as a book publisher by issuing the bestselling memoirs of former President Ulysses S. Grant , who had just died.

He lavished many hours on this and other business ventures, and was certain that his efforts would be rewarded with enormous wealth, but he never achieved the success he expected. His publishing house eventually went bankrupt.

Twain's financial failings, reminiscent in some ways of his father's, had serious consequences for his state of mind. They contributed powerfully to a growing pessimism in him, a deep-down feeling that human existence is a cosmic joke perpetrated by a chuckling God. Another cause of his angst, perhaps, was his unconscious anger at himself for not giving undivided attention to his deepest creative instincts, which centered on his Missouri boyhood.