Contents: introduction. 3 Chapter. I. Mark twain‘s impact on literature

The object of our work is Mark Twain. In this course paper the writer is examined as a master of short story. The subject is his works and his style of writing.
Compositional structure of our work consists of four major parts - Introduction, Main part, Conclusion, and List of used literature. The brief content of each part is to be presented for your attention.

Chapter.I.Mark Twain‘s impact on literature
1.1 Twain as a writer of short stories
Mark Twain, one of the most famous and influential American writers, was born in Hannibal, Missouri on November 30, 1835 and died April 21, 1910. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, he eventually adopted his famous pseudonym in 1863. Shortly after his father‘s death in 1847, when Clemens was twelve, his father passed away. After his father death, he applied for an apprenticeship at the localprinting shop. While working in the printing shop, Twain learned the skills required to be a printer and developed an aptitude for witty short essays and responses. Mark Twain was enthralled by his opportunity to develop his skills as a printer, and later he realized that he had a unique talent for writing. By working as an apprentice printer, he helped pay for family expenses and by age sixteen he began writing humorous articles and newspaper sketches, which could have been is his reason for becoming an author.
Mark Twain is more famously known for his novels. When people usually speak of him, the first works of his that come to mind are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. ―AllmodernAmericanliteraturecomesfromonebookbyMarkTwaincalledHuckleberryFinn.‖²
Of course, Twain wrote a many novels, but these are the two he is most known for. He also wrote many short stories. Short stories are known as somewhat of a dying art, but they are far from dead. The short story is a form a literature taken on by many writers past and present.
As Mark Twain explains in his essay ―How to Tell a Story‖, the art of the humorous tale relies more on how a story is told discussing its manner rather matter. This distinction is clear nowhere than in the Twain stories that depend heavily on mystery and detection, in which these literary forms meet Twain's particular use of southwestern humor and the oral tradition. In ―A Ghost Story,‖ for example, particularly the clumsy ghost of a petrified man, Cardiff Giant, learnt from the narrator that he had been mistakenly haunting a plaster cast of himself in New York display. Instead he should have been petrifying the figure on exhibit in Albany .
Twain wrote many short stories. They were written from the late 1860s to the early 1900s. Some of the stories were even published after his death. Twain was writer of many things from novels and short stories to essay and non-fiction. There wasn't anything that he could not write, and what he chose to write he wrote well. The first short story he published was The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County³. It was published in the Saturday Press under a different name.
During the 1860, Twain published two more short stores; General Washington's Negro Body-Servant and My Late Senatorial Secretaryship were both published in 1868.
In the 1870s, Mark Twain published many short stories. He published Some Learned Fables for Good Old Boys and Girls, A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage, The Invalid's Story, and The Great Revolution in Pitcairn from 1875 to 1879. He published 4 stories in the 1880s: 1601: Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside in the Time of the Tudors, The Stolen White Elephant, Luck, and Those Extraordinary Twins. Twain had a knack for short story writing the same way he did for novel writing. He was a talented writer in all areas.
In the 1900s, he was able to publish 5 more short stories before he passed away. He published The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, A Dog's Tale, Extracts from Adam's Diary, The War Prayer, Eve's Diary, and Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven. Even though he passed away in 1910, two of his stories were still published after his death: My Platonic Sweetheart and The Private Life of Adam and Eve.
Nevertheless, it is not all that would be possible to say about Twain. Mark Twain is one of the most important figures of the American life and the American culture as a whole. He was bound by the incalculable links with the move of development of his country, its national particularity, and social contradictions, and this link is felt deeply through all of his creative activity.
Leaving out of the folk layers, he became the brilliant representative of the American humanitarian intellectuals. Besides, under that layer, he did not "run", like many of his congeners, on the positions of dominating class, but he has occupied the critical position on all of the main questions concerning lives of his country, having criticized the politics dominating in his country, dominating religion, and dominating moral rules.
The importance of Twain as the artistic historian of the USA is difficult to overestimate.
Bernard Show once said that a researcher of the American society of the XIX century would have to come to address to Twain not less, than a historian of the French society of the XVIII century would have to treat to the works of
Voltaire. In development of Bernard Show‘s thought it is necessary to add that those who want to know more about the American life of the XX century, up to the most alive contemporary, will also find a lot of important and actual materials in Twain's works – with their shrewdness and generalizing power of the talent of this great American!
The importance and the role of Twain as the outrageously forming power in the American literature does not only weaken through the year passing, but it still becomes firmly established again and again with an increasing power.