Significantly, this was after taking his first trip on the Mississippi in 20 years and revisiting his boyhood hometown of Hannibal. Years later, in 1883, Twain resumed work on Huckleberry Finn. I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have got, and may possibly pigeonhole or burn the MS when it is done. I have written 400 pages on it-therefore it is very nearly half done. He wrote his friend William Dean Howells in August of that year: He was initially unsatisfied with the work and set it aside for what would be years. That same year he started writing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The work was inspired by characters from his boyhood home of Hannibal. Before its publication, Twain began a series of sketches which would eventually be used in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, finally published in 1876. ![]() He later collaborated with Charles Dudley Warner on his first novel, The Gilded Age, a stinging portrait of an era of rampant corruption in politics and commerce. His popularity continued to rise with the publication in 1872 of Roughing It, an account of his own sojourn out west 10 years earlier. This book was published as a subscription book sold door-to-door, and made Mark Twain the best-selling author in America. Then in 1869 came Innocents Abroad, the account of a globe-trotting pleasure cruise with a boatload of American travelers. ![]() His first book, published in 1867 when he was just 22, was a series of sketches entitled The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches. These experiences form the basis for much of the first part of Burns’ documentary, providing viewers with a broad sense of Mark Twain’s beginnings. From there he traveled to Hawaii, then known as the Sandwich Islands, to write his observations for a California newspaper. He fell back on his skills as a journalist, first in Virginia City, then in San Francisco. When the Civil War broke out he joined a ragtag Southern militia band that never saw real action, and then, rather than join the Confederate Army, went west to seek his fortune mining gold, at which he was a dismal failure, like so many others. At 17 he traveled extensively up and down the Mississippi working as a journalist, then served as an apprentice riverboat pilot until he became a certified steamboat pilot in his own right. He started out at 14, working at a newspaper managed by his older brother. Mark Twain, born Samuel Clemens, the fourth child of a slave owning merchant who died before Sam was 12, was thrust into the world of work at an early age. Burns’ familiar technique of panning across, and zooming out of and into the images adds a dimension of movement which helps bring the subject matter to life. The photographs are not only of Clemens and his family and friends, which exist in surprising abundance, but of conditions which he observed, experienced and fought against. The series proceeds chronologically for the most part, employing narration, interviews and footage, mostly of the Mississippi River, shot by Burns’ film crew, as well as hundreds of historical photographs. ![]() Burns interviews a small army of Twain scholars, authors, including Arthur Miller, Russell Banks and William Styron, as well as well-known personalities like Hal Holbrook and Dick Gregory, all of whom add their own, sometimes contradictory, views on the subject. The task of distilling the essence of a man like Samuel Clemens down to a few short hours is not an easy one, if it is indeed possible at all. Skillful editing gives the presentation an internal cohesion which is Ken Burns’ hallmark. The viewer gets the sense that he or she is actually listening to Twain himself. The production is peppered with quotes from Mark Twain, employing the talents of character actor Kevin Conway to perform the readings. In the process they give us a glimpse of the powerful educational potential of the medium. It is to Burns’ and his production teams’ credit that they chose to do a film on one of the world’s greatest literary iconoclasts. The documentary, which first aired January 14 and 15, is an engaging and informative presentation of his life. Ken Burns’ two-part series for the Public Broadcasting System in the US takes it from there. Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes-I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists they were like one another and like other literary men but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.-William Dean Howells on Samuel Clemens’ funeralĪnyone who knows much about American author Mark Twain knows that he was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, and that he grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, alongside the Mississippi River. I looked a moment at the face I knew so well and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it: something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him.
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