2013.10.29 Uni Radio 內容

#1

民國65年 遠東版高中英文課本 第四冊 第九課

The Life of Mark Twain


This remarkable man went to a log-cabin school until he was twelve years old.  That was the end of his formal education.  In spite of this, he became the most famous literary figure of his generation.  He received honorary degrees from Oxford University and Yale University.  People speak of him as the best known humorous writer of all times.  He also brought realism and western local color to American  fiction.  He made millions of dollars by writing articles, short stories, and books.  His real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, but he is better known all over the world as Mark Twain.

Mark Twain was born in a small Missouri village near the Mississippi River in 1835.  At that time, Abraham Lincoln was still a young farm laborer.  The first railroad in United States had been built seven years before.  The Industrial Revolution was at hand.  This was also the literary period later called the "New England Renaissance."




#2

Mark Twain was not a healthy baby.  In fact, he was not expected to live through the first winter.  But with his mother's tender care, he managed to survive.  He had been born in a tiny tow-room cabin, where his family of eight lived together.  He had four brothers and sisters.

As a boy, Mark Twain caused much trouble for his parents.  He used to play practical jokes on all of his friends and neighbors.  The nature of his jokes often led to violence.  He hated to go to school, and he constantly ran away from home.  He always went in the direction of the nearby Mississippi.  He was fascinated by that mighty rive so that he liked to sit on the bank of the river for hours at a time and just gaze at the mysterious islands and the passing boats and rafts.  He was nearly drowned nine different times.  He learned many things about the river during those day.s  He never forgot the river scenes and the unusual people riding up and down it.  He later made the scenes and the people part of the history of America in his tow books, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.

(老克 打算從 十一月份開始 展開 老克 人生偶遇專訪 系列:
11/5 貴賓 台南 歸仁國中退休 英文老師 吳炎塗 張黛露 賢伉儷 談 台灣鄉土教育之我見
11/12 貴賓 新竹市 吳龍堂先生 談 我如何教育我的孩子 吳進芳
11/19 貴賓 元智大學中文領域 黃秀燕教授 談 讀書與人生)



#3

Mark Twain inherited his genius for humor form his mother.  Obviously, he did not inherit it form his father.  He once stated that he had never seen a smile on his father's face.  On the other hand, his mother had the rare gift of saying humorous things with perfect innocence.  This same gift made Mark Twain an extremely humorous public speaker.

After his father's death in 1847, Mark Twain left school and became a printer's apprentice.  His mother felt that he would make a living and get some education in this way.  He worked for the printer as an apprentice for two years.  During that time he received only his board and clothes as pay.  By 1853, Mark Twain was tired of Missouri.  He got an urge to see the world and he started with empty pockets.  Working as a printer, he lived in St. Louis, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia.  When he traveled to the Mississippi River again, he decided to become a river-boat pilot on the river.  He worked as a pilot for fifteen months, and memorized all the turns, shallow spots, and dangerous rocks in the 1,200 miles from St. Louis to New Orleans.  He learned about the pride and responsibilities of the pilots, and became an excellent pilot.  However, his life, a pilot, came to a sudden end when the American Civil War closed the river to navigation.

Then he followed his brother Orion to Nevada in 1861 and consequently became a miner in that frontier region.  During this period he started to write short articles.  He became the editor of a newspaper there.  It was at this time that he adopted the pen name "Mark Twain."  Later he worked in San Francisco for a while and then became a miner again.  In his spare time, he wrote a short story called "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." This story made him known all over the country, and he decided to become a full-time writer and lecturer.  He went to New York in 1867 and published his first book that year.  His next book, Innocents Abroad, was published in 1869.  It was a report of his European tour and a completely new kind of travel book.  It gave him a national reputation.

In 1870, Mark Twain was married to Olivia Langdon in New York.  It was an extremely successful marriage.  They were devoted to each other throughout their lives.  His wife Olivia had a strong and lasting influence on his writing.  In the years following his marriage, he wrote the books for which he is most famous: Tom Sawyer in 1876, and Huckleberry Finn in 1884.

He made vast profits from writing and lecturing, but time after time, he lost money in bad investments.  He finally lost his entire fortune in the publishing business in 1895.  He took the responsibility for all of his debts.  He wrote large numbers of stories in order to pay these debts.  After making a successful tour around the world giving lectures, he was finally able to pay.  Despite this tremendous effort, he had been able to keep his health.  His life had worse tragedies than the financial ones, however.  His wife died in 1904 after the death of three of their children.

At the age of seventy, his hair was completely white.  He decided to buy fourteen white suits and a hundred white neckties.  He wore nothing but white from head to foot until his death in 1910.