O Mark Twain

                                                 Trabalho de Inglês

Nome: Laís Gimenes Castiglioni

Nome: Guilherme B. Campos                                                                   Curso: 2° DS

                        [pic 1]

        Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens Twain

     ☆ 30 de novembro de 1835

   ♰ 21 de abril de 1910

He was a famous American writer and comedian, author of well-known works, such as "The adventures of Tom Sawyer", published in 1876 and pointed out as "the greatest American novel".

With a difficult childhood, after losing his father at the age of 12, Clemens started to work as a delivery man, clerk and helper to help the family financially. At 13 he became a typography apprentice, traveled the country, learned navigation on the Mississippi River, later becoming a river pilot. He participated in the civil war and, after the conflict, went to live in Nevada with his brother. There he started to write for a newspaper in the city of Virginia. He became a journalist and began to win over an audience with the short story "The famous jumping frog in Calaveras County", published in 1865.

In the following years, he met France, Italy and Palestine, when he gathered ideas and material for the publication of his book “The innocents abroad” (1869), with which he gained a certain fame as a comedian. In 1872 he published “Roughing it”, in 1873 “The Gilded Age” and in 1876 one of his greatest and most famous works, “The adventures of Tom Sawyer”, a novel based on his adolescent experiences in Mississippi. That named Twain's masterpiece, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, was published in 1884, and it is a portrait of an America that confronted the dreams of a life with freedom and in communion with nature and development which rapidly urbanized the country on an industrial scale.

The success of Twain's work was rapid and expressive and the public, critics and fellow writers identified and welcomed his creations and Twain ended up establishing himself as one of the greatest comedians of literature at that time. Twain achieved great success as a writer and as a speaker and is appointed to this day as the father of American literature. He maintained good relations with authorities, artists, intellectuals, politicians and with European royalty.

Success, however, has not been able to avoid financial problems. Although he achieved international prominence, recognition and even though he received important sums of money, Twain employed fortunes in several ventures that did not bring good results with a profit, wasting his assets. Which led him to declare bankruptcy in the 1890s. With the help of his financier friend Henry Huttleston Rogers, Twain overcomes financial problems by giving lectures and managing the profit on his books with less risky businesses.

In addition to financial problems, Twain's last years were marked by losses in his family, wife and children, and by satirical pessimism in the writings. An ironic dimension of his worldview and his satire of the American dream make a robust portrait of the American society of his time.