View on Slavery in Mark Twain’s Writing
Uploaded by Markc8947 on Jan 12, 2007
Writers and authors always express their views in their work, even if they say that they separate their lives from their writings. Great writers need experience their work and later on reflect and write about it. Henry David Thoreau went out to Walden Pond to experience life away from distractions and really work on his writing. Wordsworth believed that writing is the spontaneous overflow of emotion recollected in tranquility. A writer needs to experience things in order to receive the emotion needed to trigger a thought.
From childhood, Clemens had always been around slaves. He was taught as a young person that slaves were quite different from white people and that slaves did not get to do certain things (Lutz 8). Even though Clemens had always talked to slaves and played with the slave children, he never once ate a meal with a slave. There was an obvious and clear issue of segregation in Missouri around the time that Clemens grew up. This clear segregation has been found in many of his books. Along with many writers, his childhood and life experiences have influenced his writings. His novels and stories have been written after many years of observations. He saw the things that were occurring around him and wanted to be able to change it. Twain wrote novels and short stories about slavery and racism in order to have the slightest effect and potentially influence others to the occurrences of both slavery and racism throughout the nation.
At that time, Clemens had no idea that there was anything wrong with slavery. No one had taught him differently and the entire culture around him did not say anything about it. Even his father beat the slaves, sometimes for no good reason. No one challenged the idea of slavery because everyone was all right with it. The papers claimed it to be a holy thing because there were slaves in the Bible (Lutz 9). Clemens’ early exposure to slavery appears in his later writing career through the characters and the fight against slavery.
Clemens spent quite a bit of his life along the Mississippi River as a riverboat pilot. It was once his dream to get his pilot license and sail the Mississippi River. On April 9, 1859, Clemens had received his license (Lutz 22)....