For more than a century, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, occupied a prominent position in American literary history as a significant character. Because of his distinct Southern drawl and demeanor, he was a terrific ambassador for the region. From his early days as a journalist to his most renowned novels, Mark Twain’s writings have influenced a wide range of American literature and popular culture. Young people in the United States have been inspired by his works (Howe 2020). He rose to fame as a comic book writer after separating himself from academic writing and becoming well-known. Mark Twain was able to separate himself from other authors of his period by writing in a way accessible to a wide range of readers.
At the time of his founding in 1961, his work was groundbreaking in Southern dialectology. Not only did Twain start writing in or about the vernacular, but he was also one of the first generations of writers to do so. Even writing or speaking in a foreign language can be challenging, as shown when Twain only settled for American literature. This man became known as an authority on the subject due in no little part to his ability to do multiple writing and analyzing duties simultaneously. Mark Twain’s early years provided him with a vast vocabulary and a love of travel and adventure. While growing up in Hannibal, Missouri, author Mark Twain encountered his fair share of river swindlers, slave traders, and numerous other river passengers thanks to “the thrill of colorful steamboats arriving at the town pier” (Howe 2020). His creative technique would eventually be influenced by the wide variety of countries, cultures, and dialects he encountered as a child. This opportunity to learn about human behavior through the written word was provided by his time as an apprentice on the Mississippi River as Mark Twain grew up. Every person he came into contact with during his stay on the river was a source of inspiration for him, and he used them as the basis for his artwork. Despite his passing, Mark Twain’s influence has lasted well beyond his time here. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn made him a household name in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but his legacy lasted far longer. In Ernest Hemingway’s work, “Huckleberry Finn represents the beginning of American writing,” he claimed (Schmidt 171). Hemingway’s admiration for Mark Twain and his grasp of the English language impacted this comment.
When it comes to nineteenth-century American literary culture, Mark Twain was its driving force. Authors such as Herman Melville challenged the idea that “literary English” was required to produce literature, although it was widely accepted (Melville 2017). While attempting to provide a voice to his protagonist, Mark Twain employed his “vernacular of the people” when writing Huck Finn to give a voice to an illiterate, impoverished white youngster in the American hinterlands who did not speak the King’s English. With the loosest possible accent, grammar and vocabulary, it was only fitting that he communicated in such an exuberant manner as an outlaw would.
Hemingway’s famous comment on Mark Twain’s “simplified” American literary English, and Hemingway authored The Old Man and the Sea to break away from the lofty Victorian style of English authors like Charles Dickens and Henry James (Howe 2020). On the other hand, Twain’s influence may be found in many subjects. Because of Mark Twain’s literary success, a whole generation of American writers has been affected by his writing style.
Inspired by Huck Finn, they created their famous characters, whether knowingly or not. Nick Adams from In Our Time and Jake Barnes from The Sun Also Rises are two examples of Hemingway’s young men, as well as Holden Caulfield from J. D. Salinger’s Mid-Century protagonist Holden Caulfield who, like Huck, protests against “phoniness” and conventional morality in the novels of Sherwood Anderson and Saul Bellow. Aside from autobiographies produced by women in the late twentieth century, Huck’s influence may be found in contemporary southern fiction. While Rick Bragg’s portrayal of himself in All Over Merely the Shoutin’ is only one such fictitious persona, he is just one example.
Hemingway comes to the idea that one thinks of elderly people from the 20th century who may have a larger view of the world than Huck has. Even though they may not share Huck’s core decency and loathing of foreign false gods, they have the same fundamental aversion. Practical realists such as Huck are often at odds with religious fundamentalism. In The Sun also Rises, Jake, a character played by Ernest Hemingway, enters the chapel and begins to pray. People were praying and incense streaming from the pillars, yet some lovely windows brightened the drab and dismal ambiance. When he finishes his prayer, he adds, “I bent my head and prayed for magnificent bullfights and wonderful fiestas and great fishing.” In my heart, I wished that the bullfights would be magnificent, the festival would be enjoyable, and the fishing would be fantastic. It was Huck’s prayer, said almost entirely in his own words.
Another author who comes to mind, H.L Mencken, a twentieth-century American novelist, is highly inspired by Mark Twain’s work. But Mencken became one of the most well-known and influential social commentators in America throughout the first half of the twentieth century, rather than a writer of fiction. Mencken viewed himself as a modern-day Mark Twain in many ways, and he was correct. It was not only his favorite novel but also the one he returned to the most frequently: he read it nearly every year for the rest of his life. An easier way to put it is that Mark Twain’s role in nineteenth-century America was to expose hypocrisy and pretense, to see through hypocrites and embrace reality. The author worked tirelessly for several decades to complete a multi-volume book on American linguistics released in the late 1970s. When he set out to pen his childhood memoir, Happy Days, published in 1939, he looked to Mark Twain for inspiration. However, unlike Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, his tales take place in Baltimore’s streets rather than America’s heartland (Howe 2020). A book on boyhood that was more than just a book about youth was an example of what Mark Twain accomplished when he wrote his childhood classics.
As with any real-life American of Twain’s era, one can relate to the characters in Twain’s works just as easily as reading about them in the Times newspaper. According to this author, the Mississippi River serves as the mythical center of the United States of America. One of his best-known works, The Color Purple, foreshadowed a significant problem that the United States would face in the twentieth century: racial injustice. The most eloquent representative of our country’s literary tradition in the United States, he was a writer par excellence. William Dean Howells was dubbed “the Lincoln of our Literature” and referred to as such in his biography.
Works Cited
Howe, Lawrence. “Mark Twain, the World, and Me: Following the Equator, Then and Now.” (2020): 170-172.
Melville, Herman. The Writings of Herman Melville. Northwestern University Press, 2017.
Schmidt, Barbara. “Critical Insights: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ed. by R. Kent Rasmussen.”The Mark Twain Annual 16.1 (2018): 169-173.