Mark Twain - A Brief Assessment
As one of America's first and
foremost realists a humorists,Mark Twain,the pen name of Samuel
Langhorne Clemens usually wrote about his own personal experiences and
and things he knew about from firsthand experience.His life spanned the
two Americas,the frontier America that produced so much of national
mythology and the emerging urban,industrial giant of the 20th century.At
the heart of Twain's achievement is his creation of Tom Sawyer and Huck
Finn,who embody the mythic America,midway between the wilderness and
the model state.
The Gilded Age,came in 1873.It was one of the first
novels,which tried to describe the new morality (or immorality) of
post-Civil War America.One of the new elements of this novel is that it
creates a picture of the entire nation,rather than of just one
region.Although it has a number of Twain's typically hu