Talk:Mark Twain

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Mark Twain article.
To-do list for Mark Twain: edit · history · watch · refresh


Here are some tasks you can do:
  • Expand:
    • Needs info on his marriage and family life --plange 22:44, 23 October 2006 (UTC)
    • Needs info on his travels (Nevada, northern California, Hawaii, Egypt, Israel) and his writing and dissertations related to travel. dpotter 03:00, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
    • Needs discussion of the importance of Twain to the American identity (see comments below) dpotter 03:00, 24 October 2006 (UTC)
    • Leads needs to be expanded per WP:LEAD and summarize the whole article --plange 16:32, 29 October 2006 (UTC)
This article is part of WikiProject Missouri, a WikiProject related to the U.S. state of Missouri.
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page.
Portal:Biography
 Biography Portal
Start This article has been rated as Start-Class on the Project's quality scale. [FAQ] See comments
Core This article is listed on this Project's core biographies page.
This article is supported by the Arts and Entertainment work group.
Article Creation and Improvement Drive Mark Twain was the Article Creation and Improvement Drive for the week starting on Sunday, 22 October 2006.

For more details, see the Article Creation and Improvement Drive history.
This article has been selected for Version 0.5 and the next release version of Wikipedia. This Langlit article has been rated Start-Class on the assessment scale.


Contents

[edit] Missing Information

There is little or no information about Mark Twain's childhood or marriage or education or death in this article! From my sources, he had primary eduction, up to 5th grade and had married with Olivia Langdon and had three daughters, Clara, Jean, and Susy. [1] --201.27.60.228 01:21, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Urban myth

I seem to recall an urban myth that Twain was so well known, that someone wrote a letter, addressed as "To Mark Twain, God knows where he is". The US Mail was able to deliver this letter, and Twain replied with "God knew". Or something like that. Errabee 00:16, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Might be significant for the USPS but probably not for Mark Twain. Lincoln187 09:28, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Pen name Mark Twain wrongly explained

The article asserts that Twain explained his pen name as referring to "twine", or string, used in sounding the depth of the river. Twain himself invariably writes "twain" not "twine", and gives the riverboatman's cry as "mark twain" or, more fully, "by the mark twain". This has nothing to do with the word "twine", or with a "twisting" of it to "twaine", and everything to do with the fact that "twain" meant "two" (see the Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. twain). "By the mark twain" meant "according to the mark [on the line], [the depth is] two fathoms". This is stated by Clemens in a footnote to Chapter 8 ("Perplexing Lessons") of _Life on the Mississippi_ where he glosses "mark twain" as "two fathoms" and goes on to say "Mark three is three fathoms". The writer of this article has made two mistakes: misunderstanding the word "twain", and attributing that misunderstanding to Clemens. 66.90.229.42 03:04, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! Excellent comment. I've updated the article, verbatim in parts, with your note. Please feel free to edit and adjust as needed. -- Stbalbach 13:01, 5 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] A Murder, A Mystery, and A Marriage

In the bibliography section this work is noted as unpublished until 2001. Actual, a 16 copy limited edition was published in 1945 as a test of copyright status. Of these 16 copies, 12 are in museums or libraries, 2 have disappeared, and 2 are in private libries (one of which is mine). The 1945 publication is noted in the introduction of the 2001 edition.

Since this article is locked, I as that someone else correct th bibliography. Bob Nelson - 9 October 2006

updated as requested. I'm jealous!--Paul 02:25, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Cultural depictions of Mark Twain

I've started an approach that may apply to Wikipedia's Core Biography articles: creating a branching list page based on in popular culture information. I started that last year while I raised Joan of Arc to featured article when I created Cultural depictions of Joan of Arc, which has become a featured list. Recently I also created Cultural depictions of Alexander the Great out of material that had been deleted from the biography article. Since cultural references sometimes get deleted without discussion, I'd like to suggest this approach as a model for the editors here. Regards, Durova 16:29, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

This has just been started from material that keeps being deleted from this entry: Mark Twain in popular culture (Emperor 16:42, 17 October 2006 (UTC))
Thanks, I'll post there. Cheers, Durova 18:45, 18 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Queen Victoria's Jubilee

The bibliography section lists this book as published posthumously. Recent research by Kevin Mac Donnell of Mac Donnell rare books proves definitively that this book was published prior to Twain's death. It was limited to 195 copies (I have #162), making it the only limited edition of his works published during his lifetime.

Bob Nelson - 18 October 2006

[edit] Twain and the American identity

Twain helped craft an "American identity," a uniquely American perspective on the world. In his travels, he had the audacity and skill to compare ancient cultures against American norms in a way that promoted and helped define a pride and self-confidence in American culture.

His (mis)use of English celebrated unelevated, colloquial language in ways that also helped to define an America that all Americans could appreciate, idealize and adore. dpotter 03:04, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Automated suggestions

If you can't necessarily contribute to the article in terms of new content, these automated suggestions should help:

The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question.

  • Please expand the lead to conform with guidelines at WP:LEAD. The article should have an appropriate number of paragraphs as is shown on WP:LEAD, and should adequately summarize the article.
  • Per WP:CONTEXT and WP:BTW, years with full dates should be linked; for example, link January 15, 2006, but do not link January 2006.
  • Per WP:MOS#Headings, headings generally should not repeat the title of the article. For example, if the article was Ferdinand Magellan, instead of using the heading ==Magellan's journey==, use ==Journey==.

*Please alphabetize the interlanguage links.[1]

  • There are a few sections that are too short and that should be either expanded or merged.
  • Watch for redundancies that make the article too wordy instead of being crisp and concise. (You may wish to try Tony1's redundancy exercises.)
    • Vague terms of size often are unnecessary and redundant - “some”, “a variety/number/majority of”, “several”, “a few”, “many”, “any”, and “all”. For example, “All pigs are pink, so we thought of a number of ways to turn them green.”
  • As done in WP:FOOTNOTE, footnotes usually are located right after a punctuation mark (as recommended by the CMS, but not mandatory), such that there is no space inbetween. For example, the sun is larger than the moon [2]. is usually written as the sun is larger than the moon.[2]
  • Please provide citations for all of the {{fact}}s.
  • Please ensure that the article has gone through a thorough copyediting so that it exemplifies some of Wikipedia's best work. See also User:Tony1/How to satisfy Criterion 2a. [2]

You may wish to browse through User:AndyZ/Suggestions for further ideas.

[edit] Faulkner quote

I haven't had any success locating the original source of the Faulkner quote used in the introduction. I did, however, find a longer version of the quote:

   
“
 In my opinion, Mark Twain was the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs. Before him the writers who were considered American were not, really. Their tradition, their culture was European culture. It was only with Twain, there became a true indigenous American culture. Of course Whitman was in chronology the first, but Whitman was an experimenter with the notion there might be an American literature. Twain was the first that grew up in the belief that there is an American literature and he found himself producing it. So, I call him the father of American literature.
   
”

Kaldari 22:05, 24 October 2006 (UTC)

Neat. I'll be removing the shorter Faulkner quote from the article until a source can be found however, along with a *lot* of other unsourced things. CloudNine 09:59, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
I have posted a monetary reward to the Reward Board for anyone who can find the original source for the quote. If anyone else would like to contribute to the bounty, feel free to up the amount. Kaldari 16:41, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
Strangely the only quote about Twain I've found so far that can be attributed to Faulkner is that Twain was "a hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe." - Early Prose and Poetry (1962), pp. 93-97. Kaldari 00:00, 26 October 2006 (UTC)
The longish quote above can be found in Hutchinson, Stuart (1999-09-01). Mark Twain: Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Columbia University Press, 80. ISBN 0231115415.. However, the last sentence is incomplete and should read "So I call him the father of American literature, though he is not the first one."
dpotter 22:31, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

Finally found the original source: Faulkner at Nagano (Tokyo, 1956), by Robert A. Jelliffe. Good luck finding that at the library! The interview is also reprinted in Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner: 1926-1962, Edited by James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate, New York: 1968. Kaldari 18:58, 28 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Christian Science?

Twain was known for his opposition to Christian Science which was sort of the Scientology of its day.

I know someone who might write the section. He knows the topic really well. Will ask. Keith Henson 18:53, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Biography

I was wondering if anyone has access to older Mark Twain fiction books written between 1910 and 1923 that have an introduction by a scholar. Very often these editor introductions contain professional quality 5-10 page biographies that are now in the public domain, and which can be easily adapted to Wikipedia. The biography page for Robert Louis Stevenson was done in this way from a 1918 book and came out very well. It's a shame that America's first great man of literature has such an incredibly bad article. -- Stbalbach 14:42, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

Perhaps the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica article on Mark Twain can be adapted? --Paul 15:16, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
Here is a rough version of it:

MARK TWAIN, the nom de plume of SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS (1835-1910), American author, who was born on the 30th of November 1835, at Florida, Missouri. His father was a country merchant from Tennessee, who moved soon after his son's birth to Hannibal, Missouri, a little town on the Mssissippi. When the boy was only twelve his father died, and thereafter he had to get his education as best he could. Of actual schooling he had little. He learned how to set type, and as a journeyman printer he wandered widely, going even as far east as New York. At seventeen he went back to the Mississippi, determined to become a pilot on a river-steamboat. In his Life on the Mississippi he has recorded graphically his experiences while "learning the river." But in 1861 the war broke out, and the pilot's occupation was gone. After a brief period of uncertainty the young man started West with his brother, who had been appointed lieutenant-governor of Nevada. He went to the mines for a season, and there he began to write in the local newspapers, adopting the pen name of " Mark Twain," from a call used in taking soundings on the Mississippi steamboats. He drifted in time to San Francisco, and it was a newspaper of that city which in 1867 supplied the money for him to join a party going on a chartered steamboat to the Mediterranean ports. The letters which he wrote during this voyage were gathered in 1869 into a volume, The Innocents Abroad, and the book immediately won a wide and enduring popularity. This popularity was of service to him when he appeared on the platform with a lecture - or rather with an apparently informal talk, rich in admirably delivered anecdote.

He edited a daily newspaper in Buffalo for a few months, and in 1870 he married Miss Olivia L. Langdon (d. 1904), removing a year later to Hartford, where he established his home. Roughing It was published in 1872, and in 1874 he collaborated with Charles Dudley Warner in The Gilded Age, from which he made a play, acted many hundred times with John T. Raymond as "Colonel Sellers." In 1875 he published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the sequel to which, Huckleberry Finn, did not appear until 1884. The result of a second visit to Europe was humorously recorded in A Tramp Abroad (188o), followed in 1882 by a more or less historical romance, The Prince and the Pauper; and a year later came Life on the Mississippi. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the next. of his books, was published (in 1884) by a New York firm in which the author was chief partner. This firm prospered for a while, and issued in 1889 Mark Twain's own comic romance, A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court, and in 1892 a less successful novel, The American Claimant. But after a severe struggle the publishing house failed, leaving the author charged with its very heavy debts. After this disaster he issued a third Mississippi Valley novel, The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, in 1894, and in 1896 another historical romance, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, wherein the maid is treated with the utmost sympathy and reverence. He went on a tour round the world, partly to make money by lecturing and partly to get material for another book of travels, published in 1897, and called in America Following the Equator, and in England More Tramps Abroad. From time to time he had collected into volumes his scattered sketches; of these the first, The Celebrated Frog of Calaveras County, appeared in 1867, and the latest, The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg, in 1900.

To be recorded also is a volume of essays and literary criticisms, How to Tell a Story (1897). A complete edition of his works was published in twenty-two volumes in 1899–1900 by the American Publishing Company of Hartford. And in this last year, having paid off all the debts of his old firm, he returned to America. By the time he died his books had brought him a considerable fortune. In later years he published a few minor volumes of fiction, and a series of severe and also amusing criticisms of Christian Science (pub-lished as a book in 1907), and in 1906 he began an autobiography in the North American Review. He had a great reception in England in 1907, when he went over to receive from Oxford the degree of Doctor of Literature. He died at Redding, Connecticut, on the 21st of April 1910. Of his four daughters only one, who married the Russian pianist Gabrilowitch, survived him. Mark Twain was an outstanding figure for many years as a popular American personality in the world of letters. He is commonly considered as a humorist, and no doubt he is a humorist of a remarkable comic force and of a refreshing fertility. But the books in which his humour is broadly displayed, the travels and the sketches, are not really so significant of his power as the three novels of the Mississippi, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Pudd'nhead Wilson, wherein we have preserved a vanished cvilization, peopled with typical figures, and presented with inexorable veracity. There is no lack of humour in them, and there is never a hint of affectation in the writing; indeed, the author, doing spontaneously the work nearest to his hand, was very likely unconscious that he was making a contribution to history.

But such Huckleberry Finn is, beyond all question; it is a story of very varied interest, now comic, now almost tragic, frequently poetic, unfailingly truthful, although not always sustained at its highest level. And in these three works of fiction there are not only humour and pathos, character and truth, there is also the largeness of outlook on life such as we find only in the works of the masters. Beneath his fun-making we can discern a man who is fundamentally serious, and whose ethical standards are ever lofty. Like Cervantes at times, Mark Twain reveals a depth of melancholy beneath his playful humour, and like Moliere always, he has a deep scorn and a burning detestation of all sorts of sham and pretence, a scorching hatred of humbug and hypocrisy. Like Cervantes and like Moliere, he is always sincere and direct. After Mark Twain's death, his intimate friend, W. D. Howells, published a series of personal recollections in Harper's Magazine

--Paul 15:41, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

I looked at it, it's not a great article, very brief. First two paragraph are possible, last two are dated. I suppose it could be adapted but I'm not sure it's better than what we have, and might make it more difficult to expand using alternative sources in the future. There must be something better? The EB article was probably written before he died (1910), with a last-minute inclusion of his death date, so there wasn't much time or scholarship to reflect on his life or work. Anything post WWI is going to be more modern in outlook and style. -- Stbalbach 15:42, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Death of Mark Twain

I added a brief paragraph on the death of Samuel Clemens under the biography header with some notes on its impact, quoting President Taft. Cited the source. Jeremy Bright 20:29, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

After rewording an awkward mention of Halley's Comet in the opening paragraph, I added a quote to the Death section tying the 2 edits together. --Bill W. Smith, Jr. 05:28, 1 November 2006 (UTC)

Since angina pectoris is a symptom, not a disease or cause of death, I fail to see how he died from it. Do you have a better cite? —Trevyn 06:07, 9 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Twain's Break mid-Huck Finn

My teacher is asking us to research the break Mark Twain took while writing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. All I've found is that it was either before or after chapter 16, and that he went traveling during this time. Does anyone have any information on this?

[edit] Twain's children

The phrase "They tried to have more kids but only had daughters" sounds like girls aren't quite children (or they were trying for young goats:)). I've tried rephrasing it.

-Andrew


Im not sure who removed the Luke Skywalker thing. Likely some uptight person. Honestly, after sitting at my desk all day long, I saw that, and I Dont think I have laughed that hard in months. Thanks to whoever changed it to Luke Skywalker, for brightening up an otherwise crummy day.  :)

[edit] Career Overview section

It's marked for cleanup, and for good reason. It has a good amount of information but lacks organization. Ideas for how to reorganize it and subsequently pick sections to expand? My immediate impulse is that his literary career deserves a section apart from his scientific interests and political views. Everyday847 04:14, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Blockquote vs. CQuote

In WP:MoS it says that blockquote is preferred over the use of cquote, at least in any FARC. Additionally, as noted, cquote looks silly and cartoonish. That said, I am not going to revert the changes myself. --Bill W. Smith, Jr. 18:53, 18 November 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Legacy

the external link should be a reference, not just in the middle of the text. that's what refs are for. it's still there. raining girl 23:11, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Notes and References section - Nowiki

I tried adding the following footnote after the first sentence of Section 1.3 in the article: ([2]). The existing nowiki structure of the article made the results ineffective. Could someone please add the reference as requested? Also, how in the future would I myself be able to do this, if I were to face a similar situation again? Thank you very much. robertjohnsonrj 23:10, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

You mean after the word "Olivia"? That's working fine for me. -- lucasbfr talk 00:43, 11 December 2006 (UTC)
You added "[http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/TUM_VAN/TWAIN_MARK.html|reference]" That is incorrect syntax... I'm not entirely sure what you wanted to do, but here is a few options...
  1. [http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/TUM_VAN/TWAIN_MARK.html Reference] makes this: "Reference"
  2. [http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/TUM_VAN/TWAIN_MARK.html] makes: [3]
  3. <ref>[http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/TUM_VAN/TWAIN_MARK.html]</ref> makes: [3] (And it adds a number to the reference section)
Is that what your looking for? Wikipedia:Footnotes and Wikipedia:Citing sources has more information that might be helpful. ---J.S (T/C) 03:02, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

In the youth part of the biography, meager is written as meger, could someone please correct this typo?

192.136.45.2 00:59, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../m/a/r/Talk%7EMark_Twain_8423.html"