What author had the most significant influence on American literature.

 

Discuss Mark Twain

 

Approximately 2000words

 

Subject are is American literature

The paper should take the direction of the attached file content-wise.

HANDOUT ONE Mark Twain’s Literary Influence
Mark Twain has entered permanently into
American popular culture. Almost everyone is
familiar with the image of the man—the unruly
mane of white hair with matching moustache and
eyebrows, the white suit, the ever-present cigar.
And most people quote his sayings, including
many who don’t know it’s Mark Twain they’re
quoting: “Man is the only animal that blushes.
Or needs to”; “To cease smoking is the easiest
thing I ever did; I ought to know because I’ve done
it a thousand times”; and, of course, “The reports
of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
However, it may surprise some people to learn
how highly Twain is regarded by serious literary
critics. He is the subject of many biographies and
countless works of literary analysis. Even more
tellingly, he is held in extremely high esteem by
other writers. One of the earliest tributes—and
still perhaps the best-known—appears in Ernest
Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa (1935):
“All modern American literature comes from one
book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. . . .
[I]t’s the best book we’ve had. All American
writing comes from that. There was nothing
before. There has been nothing as good since.”
Ralph Ellison, whose Invisible Man (1952) is
considered one of the greatest American novels
since World War II, explained in an essay what
Twain had meant to him and to American
literature: “Mark Twain … transformed elements
of regional vernacular speech into a medium
of uniquely American literary expression and
thus taught us how to capture that which is
essentially American in our folkways and manners.
For indeed the vernacular process is a way of
establishing and discovering our national identity.” 16 sTHE BIG READ Twain’s influence as a master of the vernacular
was also demonstrated by Ellison’s friend and
fellow novelist Saul Bellow. Bellow’s first two
novels were small-scale “literary” works. But his
third novel, The Adventures of Augie March (1953),
whose very title is a kind of tribute to Twain, was
a major breakthrough in his career. It is a large,
sprawling book, narrated in the lively, slangy, very
American voice of Augie himself, and filled with
vivid characters and both grotesque and hilarious
incidents.
Another demonstration of Twain’s influence
came in 1996 with the publication of the
Oxford Mark Twain, a twenty-nine volume set
of all the books Twain published in his lifetime.
Each volume contains an introduction by a
leading contemporary author, some of whom
describe Twain’s importance in their discovery
of literature and their own development as writers.
These authors include Arthur Miller (“Death
of a Salesman”), Cynthia Ozick (The Shawl),
Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five), and Toni
Morrison (Beloved).
William Faulkner is sometimes regarded as the
greatest American novelist since Mark Twain.
Like Hemingway, Bellow, and Morrison, he was
awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the world’s
most prestigious literary honor. Faulkner’s debt
to Mark Twain is clear in some of his best work,
such as the stories “Barn Burning” and “The
Bear,” which show boys coming of age as they
are exposed to the cruelty and violence around
them. It was a debt that Faulkner was happy to
acknowledge. At a literary conference in Japan
in 1955, he called Twain “the father of American
literature … the first truly American writer, and all
of us since are his heirs.” National Endowment for the Arts

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