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Mark Twain
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My favourite is 'Roughing it' ( I think it's called that.) It's an account of his travels around Europe and Britain. Very funny observations. I recommened today's broad-cast - one of the finest and funniest descriptions of Teddy Roosevelt ever
I love The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the latter even more than the former. These stories are full of amusing anecdotes that entertain on their own AND they forward the story.WRITERS TAKE NOTE:
Here is Mark Twain as Literary Critic. In his essay, Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses, Twain begins by saying that some esteemed professors have praised Fenimore Cooper's stories, obviously without reading the stories. He further says that the stories should be judged by those who have read them. Twain continues:
"There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction -- some say twenty-two. In Deerslayer Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:
1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the Deerslayer tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air.
2. They require that the episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale and shall help to develop it. But as the Deerslayer tale is not a tale and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.
3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.
4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.
5. They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the Deerslayer tale to the end of it.
6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. But this law gets little or no attention in the Deerslayer tale, as Natty Bumppo's case will amply prove.
7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a Negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the Deerslayer tale.
8. They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as "the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest," by either the author or the people in the tale. But this rule is persistently violated in the Deerslayer tale.
9. They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. But these rules are not respected in the Deerslayer tale.
10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate, and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the Deerslayer tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.
11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader Can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency. But in the Deerslayer tale this rule is vacated. In addition to these large rules there are some little ones. These require that the author shall
12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
14. Eschew surplusage.
15. Not omit necessary details.
16. Avoid slovenliness of form.
17. Use good grammar.
18. Employ a simple and straighfforward style. Even these seven are coldly and persistently violated in the Deerslayer tale.
COOPER'S GIFT in the way of invention was not a rich endowment but such as it was he liked to work it, he was pleased with the effects, and indeed he did some quite sweet things with it. In his little box of stage-properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go. A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of the moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick. Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently was his broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn't step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred handier things to step on but that wouldn't satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig, and if he can't do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the Leatherstocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series.
And this is just the first page of Twain's essay. The next pages discuss in detail how Cooper's story details are not consistent with the laws of nature/ laws of physics.
You ought to read 'The prairie' when Natty Bumpo, who must be in his eighties at the time, is traversing the plains of the mid-west - having already crossed the rockies - and come back again - all because he finds the Eastern wilderness a bit over crowded. The plot meanders all over the place, people just wandering back and forth as circumstances dictate. Interesting for all kinds of reasons, but not a great novel : )
Jeanne:The Fennimore Cooper crit is one I hadn't read. Thanks for sharing. It's super.
"Eschew surplusage" --I'm borrowing this for my blog!
"They (the rules governing literary art) require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others."(Oh to be so funny and so accurate!)
The Fenimore Cooper crit is in a volume titled How To Tell A Story and Other Essays, Oxford University Press. The complete essay is also on line.
Mod
Dead characters. This reminds me of my first novel that I wrote three years ago. One of my beta-readers complained that my characters were all flat. So I reread one of the scenes and noticed this:
Character One: We should sneak into his laboratories and find out what is he up to.
Character Two: Yes, that is a good idea.
Character Three: I agree.
Anybody see what's wrong with this? I call it the yes-man syndrome.
Heh! Good name for it! This is how we learn -- we try things and some work better than others. We eventually get a gut sense that something isn't working. If not, our readers tell us.
I hate to be the damper here but I don't understand how The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is called a classic.
Mod
I just didn't think it was memorable. I found it boring and didn't like any of the characters. The only thing I really appreciate about the book is the writing style. I don't like it but I appreciated the effort and talent it took to write in the characters' dialect.
Yes, there are several distinct dialects in Huckleberry Finn .
Mod
Have you read Unlocked yet? You can get a free eBook copy at the www.UnlockedProject.com web site.
No, I haven't read Unlocked. I hadn't even heard of it until I joined this group. Now you have my curiousity.
"What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it.
Who was it who said, "Blessed is the man who has found his work"? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work--not somebody else's work. The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man's work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.
- "A Humorist's Confession," The New York Times, 11/26/1905"
Which of Mark Twain's books did you enjoy most? What did they mean to you?