"Advice to Youth" is a satirical essay written by Mark Twain in 1882. Twain was asked by persons unspecified to write something "to [the] youth." [1] While the exact audience of his speech is uncertain, it is most probably American; in his posthumous collected works, editor's notes have conjecturally assigned the address to the Boston Saturday Morning Club. [2] In the essay, Twain speaks primarily of advice which can be broken into six specific topics. These include: selective obedience towards parents, respecting superiors, the wisdom of going to bed early and waking up early, lying, firearm etiquette, and the importance of good books. [3]
This essay is a classic example of Juvenalian satire. This satirical mode can be seen in Mark Twain's recurrent employment of sarcasm while addressing the youth with his words of wisdom. Interpreted by scholars as a critique of authority, Twain's "Advice to Youth" may have been a topical response to the prohibition of alcohol in Kansas in 1881, a legislative action which many residents found deeply upsetting.[ citation needed ]
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel by American author Mark Twain, which was first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885.
Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of exposing or shaming the perceived flaws of individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into improvement. Although satire is usually meant to be humorous, its greater purpose is often constructive social criticism, using wit to draw attention to both particular and wider issues in society.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced," with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature." His novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel." Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.
A comic novel is a novel-length work of humorous fiction. Many well-known authors have written comic novels, including P. G. Wodehouse, Henry Fielding, Mark Twain, and John Kennedy Toole. Comic novels are often defined by the author's literary choice to make the thrust of the work—in its narration or plot—funny or satirical in orientation, regardless of the putative seriousness of the topics addressed.
The American Anti-Imperialist League was an organization established on June 15, 1898, to battle the American annexation of the Philippines as an insular area. The anti-imperialists opposed forced expansion, believing that imperialism violated the fundamental principle that just republican government must derive from "consent of the governed." The League argued that such activity would necessitate the abandonment of American ideals of self-government and non-intervention—ideals expressed in the United States Declaration of Independence, George Washington's Farewell Address and Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. The Anti-Imperialist League was ultimately defeated in the battle of public opinion by a new wave of politicians who successfully advocated the virtues of American territorial expansion in the aftermath of the Spanish–American War and in the first years of the 20th century, although the organization lasted until 1920.
George Washington Cable was an American novelist notable for the realism of his portrayals of Creole life in his native New Orleans, Louisiana. He has been called "the most important southern artist working in the late 19th century", as well as "the first modern Southern writer." In his treatment of racism, mixed-race families and miscegenation, his fiction has been thought to anticipate that of William Faulkner.
William Wright (1829–1898), better known by the pen name Dan DeQuille or Dan De Quille, was an American author, journalist, and humorist. He was best known for his written accounts of the people, events, and silver mining operations on the Comstock Lode at Virginia City, Nevada, including his non-fiction book History of the Big Bonanza.
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte is an 1896 novel by Mark Twain which recounts the life of Joan of Arc.
A Tramp Abroad is a work of travel literature, including a mixture of autobiography and fictional events, by American author Mark Twain, published in 1880. The book details a journey by the author, with his friend Harris, through central and southern Europe. While the stated goal of the journey is to walk most of the way, the men find themselves using other forms of transport as they traverse the continent. The book is the fourth of Mark Twain's six travel books published during his lifetime and is often thought to be an unofficial sequel to the first one, The Innocents Abroad (1869).
"Advice for Good Little Girls" is a humorous essay by Mark Twain, first published in 1865, which lists satirical pieces of advice for how young girls should behave. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Mark Twain called it an early precursor to Twain's satirical youth novels Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
David Robert Loy is an American scholar and author, and teacher in the Sanbo Zen lineage of Japanese Zen Buddhism.
Sonnet 71 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It's a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man. It focuses on the speaker's aging and impending death in relation to his young lover.
"To the Person Sitting in Darkness" is an essay by American author Mark Twain published in the North American Review in February 1901. It is a satire exposing imperialism as revealed in the Boxer Uprising and its aftermath, the Boer War, and the Philippine–American War, expressing Twain's anti-imperialist views. It mentions the historical figures Emilio Aguinaldo, William McKinley, Joseph Chamberlain, William Scott Ament and others, and fueled the Twain–Ament indemnities controversy.
In literature and other artistic media, a mode is an unspecific critical term usually designating a broad but identifiable kind of literary method, mood, or manner that is not tied exclusively to a particular form or genre. Examples are the satiric mode, the ironic, the comic, the pastoral, and the didactic.
Is Shakespeare Dead? is a short, semi-autobiographical work by American humorist Mark Twain. It explores the controversy over the authorship of the Shakespearean literary canon via satire, anecdote, and extensive quotation of contemporary authors on the subject.
Diminution is a satirical technique that aims to belittle a subject via description. The term, derived from "diminutive" meaning "small," was defined by critic John M. Bullitt as "speech which tends, either by the force of low or vulgar imagery, or by other suggestion, to depress an object below its usually accepted status." According to Bullitt, diminution can take the form of "ugly or homely images," comparisons to subjects considered to be inferior, focusing on a person's unappealing physical features, or using irony, meiosis, or litotes.
The Twain–Ament indemnities controversy was a major cause célèbre in the United States of America in 1901 as a consequence of the published reactions of American humorist Mark Twain to reports of Rev. William Scott Ament and other missionaries collecting indemnities from Chinese people in the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising.
"The Awful German Language" is an 1880 essay by Mark Twain published as Appendix D in A Tramp Abroad. The essay is a humorous exploration of the frustrations a native speaker of English has with learning German as a second language.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , well known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. Twain is noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which has been called the "Great American Novel," and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). He also wrote poetry, short stories, essays, and non-fiction. His big break was "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1867).
"Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" is an essay by Mark Twain, written as a satire of literary criticism and as a critique of the writings of the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, that appeared in the July 1895 issue of North American Review. It draws on examples from The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder from Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales.