Samuel Clemens - Interpretation Of The Literary Ar Essays

Samuel Clemens - Interpretation Of The Literary Ar Essays Samuel Clemens - Interpretation Of The Literary Artist And Critical Views Of His Works Heaven and Hell and sunset and rainbows and the aurora all fused into on divine harmony . . . It is by the goodness of God that in out country we have those three unspeakable precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them. Samuel Clemens' profound response to beauty was immediately and untrammeled-the beauty of nature, for which no special training is necessary for appreciation. The quote above supports the idea that Samuel Clemens was a literary artist, possibly America's greatest. Yet, he was definitely not just a writer. He wrote many novels that became American classics. Many of Clemens' greatest works were based on his own personal experiences as a young man on the Mississippi River, and through theses writing he established a place for himself in the classics of American literature. To this day, Samuel Langhorne Clemens is, without a doubt, America's most picturesque literary figure. Perhaps a part of his appeal to t he mass imagination lies in the fact that he himself became the embodiment of literature throughout his and the rest of time. The mastery of his literary oeuvres has surpassed the conventional cascade of literature since the 1800's. Samuel Clemens will be, forevermore, the epitome of the literary world. Throughout his life, Samuel Clemens maintained an engaging and infectiously boyish enthusiasm that led his wife to nickname him Youth. Unlike most men, Samuel Clemens never did renounce his boyhood; he carried with him into maturity miraculously preserved and vibrant memories of his early and middle adolescence, and it was through these memories that he filtered his adult experience. At the age of fifty-five, he wrote to an unknown correspondent: And yet I can't go away from the boyhood period and write novels because capital is not sufficient by itself and I lack the other essential: interest in handling the men and experiences of later times, (Bellamy, Mark Twain as a Literary Artist, 16). On this circumstance, he founded an enviable fame and fortune and an enduring artistic achievement. (Bellamy, 17) Although the splendid moment of his fame is still prolonged and extends immeasurably far into the future, that fame was only a small part of his power. There was something about him that moves people who knew nothing of his renown, who did not even know who he was. Samuel Clemens' personality was of a sort that compelled those about him so strongly that wherever he went, he seemed a being from another planet, a visitant from some remote star. Biography Born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, Little Sam was a wild-headed, impetuous child of sudden ecstasies, who was constantly running away in the direction of the river and, as he later wrote, was drowned nine times in Bear Creek and was suspected of being a cat in disguise; a vividly imaginative child, who loved the companionship of the good-natured slave and visited the Negro quarters beyond the orchard as a place of ineffable enchantment; a child whose sympathy included all inanimate things; a child who pitied the dead leaf and the murmuring dried weed of November(Bellamy, 4-7). In many, if not all, of his novels, short stories, and other works, Samuel Langhorne Clemens' personal life experiences reflect heavily on his writing plots. Stories such as The Notorious Jumping From of Calaveras County, Roughing It, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, AConnecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finnhave all been closely related to some of the adventurous, dangerous, and childish experiences in Clemens' own life. As a young man, he developed a troublesome cussedness that distinguished his as a child from his elder and younger brother, Orion and Henry. His mischievousness led to a series of escapades: several times nearly drowning, purposefully contracting measles, smoking, rolling rocks down a hill before church-bound carriages, and running away from home. Clemens and his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, a port on the Mississippi River, when Samuel was four years old. There, he received a pubic school education. After the death of his father in 1847, Clemens was apprenticed