Mark Twain - BrainPop UK
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00:00I love summer vacation.
00:10Dear Tim and Moby,
00:12Why is my teacher making us read stuff by Mark Twain?
00:16From the Rid.
00:17Well, he was a pretty important writer.
00:21Mark Twain wrote over 30 books and hundreds of short stories and essays.
00:26His most famous books are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
00:31Twain's real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
00:35He was born in 1835 in Missouri.
00:38He started working at the age of 12 as a printer's apprentice or helper.
00:43Later on, he worked as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, a silver prospector
00:47in Nevada, and finally as a newspaper reporter.
00:51He used the pen name Mark Twain, which was an old-fashioned boating term that meant two
00:56fathoms deep.
00:57Well, a fathom is about two meters, and a pen name is a name that writers make up for
01:04themselves.
01:05As a reporter, Twain traveled around America and Europe collecting all kinds of weird and
01:10interesting stories along the way.
01:13His articles became favorites for the way they mixed humor and exaggeration with serious
01:18facts.
01:19After settling in Hartford, Connecticut with his wife in 1871, Twain wrote his most celebrated
01:25novels.
01:27The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in 1876, tells the story of a troublemaking kid
01:32in a small Missouri town.
01:34In one of the novel's most famous scenes, Tom tricks the other kids in the neighborhood
01:38into painting a fence for him.
01:39He even gets them to pay him for the privilege of doing it.
01:43Yeah, he was a schemer.
01:46But the story isn't just about Tom's adventures.
01:48It's a clever satire, too.
01:52A satire is a work that uses humor to make fun of human failings like greed and racism.
01:58Tom's best friend is another mischievous kid named Huckleberry Finn.
02:02In 1884, Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, all about how Huck helps
02:07Jim, a runaway slave, escape to freedom along the Mississippi River.
02:12Along the way, they meet all kinds of colorful characters, including conmen, backwoods people,
02:17and thieves.
02:19For all these reasons, Huckleberry Finn really captured the spirit of the country at the
02:23time it was published.
02:24Instead of writing in the formal style of his time, Twain wrote Huck Finn in a lower-class
02:29dialect full of slang and bad grammar.
02:33A dialect is a local version of a language.
02:36Point is, he wrote it the way people really talked.
02:40Most of America's big 20th century authors like Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner
02:44cite Mark Twain as a major influence.
02:48Throughout his life, Twain continued to travel the world and speak on lecturing tours.
02:53Some of his witty comments at parties and speaking engagements are as famous as his
02:57writing.
02:59Like it is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove
03:03all doubt.
03:04Um, another?
03:06Okay, I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
03:11No, he wasn't against schools, he just thought experience in the outside world was important
03:17too.
03:18It's a joke, a joke!