The Influence of Mark Twain
The Influence of Mark Twain Fred HOBSON University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The impact of Mark Twain was hardly limited to his own time. Although he was very well known in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the author of such classics as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, his influence since his death in 1910 has in fact been greater than it was during his lifetime. Ernest Hemingway is famous for his statement that (and I paraphrase) all modern American literature begins with a single book, Huckleberry Finn, and that statement was based largely on Hemingway’s estimate of Twain’s use of the American language. Mark Twain indeed led the democratic movement in American literature of the nineteenth century. He broke with the idea that literature had to be written in “literary English,” a concept to which earlier writers, even bold ones such as Herman Melville, had largely adhered. But Twain, in Huck Finn, dared to tell his story in what might be called the speech of the people, the common people — specifically, the voice of an uneducated poor white boy in the American hinterlands — and that meant that his narrator used anything but the King’s English. Huck’s speech was as colloquial, ungrammatical, and colorful as only American frontier speech could be. Twain, indeed, simplified American literary English, and this is largely what Hemingway had in mind in his famous remark. Hemingway himself wanted to simplify American speech, to make it as tangible and concrete as possible, to break with the high Victorian prose of English novelists as well as Anglo-Americans such as Henry James. But Twain’s influence is seen in other ways as well. Not only did later American writers admire — and follow — what Mark Twain did with language, but so many of those writers had Twain’s 13