representation of life, which frequently lacks form, the realists tended to downplay plot in favor of character and to concentrate on middle-class life and preoccupations, avoiding larger, more dramatic issues.Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was an American writer and humorist, whose best work is characterized by broad, often irreverent humor or biting social satire. Twain's writing is also known for realism of place and language, memorable characters, and hatred of hypocrisy and oppression.Much of Twain's best work was written in the 1870s and 1880s in Hartford or during the summers at Quarry Farm, near Elmira, New York. Twain's skill in capturing the rhythms of life helps make his books count among the masterpieces of American literature. Twain’s work during the 1890s and the 1900s is marked by growing pessimism and bitterness—the result of his business reverses and, later, the deaths of his wife and two daughters. A significant work of this period is Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), a novel set in the South before the Civil War that criticizes racism by focusing on mistaken racial identities.Twain's work was inspired by the unconventional West, and the popularity of his work marked the end of the domination of American literature by New England writers. He is justly renowned as a humorist but was not always appreciated by the writers of his time as anything more than that. Successive generations of writers, however, recognized the role that Twain played in creating a truly American literature. He portrayed uniquely American subjects in a humorous and colloquial, yet poetic, language. His success in creating this plain but evocative language precipitated the end of American reverence for British and European culture and for the more formal language associated with those traditions."There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Observe the ass, ...
