Mark Twain
By: Kelsey Starr
Born
Mark Twain was born in Florida, MO on November 30, 1835.
literature
He used a lot of Satire. He had a red neck kid tell the story in his dialect.
Books
One of his most popular books is " The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". One of his other books, "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" was made into a movie. the book that made him famouse was "The CelebratedJumping Frog of Calaveras County". His masterpeice would be "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn".
Influences
When he was younger he worked for his brother who had started a newspaper business. He then got tired of not getting paid and moved to many different places doing the same kinds of things. He soon after came back to work with his brother only this time he got paid. As he got older he worked in many different newpaper businesses. I belive that he started to like the whole writing thing. He started publishing books after he joined the union.
Quirky detail
He loved to pull pranks on anyone he could. When he was little he was always getting in trouble with his friend Tom Blankenship. He was definantly known for his pranks.
Passage
“Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.”
Summary
An imaginative and mischievous boy named Tom Sawyer lives with his Aunt Polly and his half-brother, Sid, in the Mississippi River town of St. Petersburg, Missouri. After playing hooky from school on Friday and dirtying his clothes in a fight, Tom is made to whitewash the fence as punishment on Saturday. At first, Tom is disappointed by having to forfeit his day off. However, he soon cleverly persuades his friends to trade him small treasures for the privilege of doing his work. He trades these treasures for tickets given out in Sunday school for memorizing Bible verses and uses the tickets to claim a Bible as a prize. He loses much of his glory, however, when, in response to a question to show off his knowledge, he incorrectly answers that the first two disciples were David and Goliath.