A PORTRAIT OF MY BROTHER
I have chosen my younger brother to describe because I think that I know him very well. He is so Imaginative and creative and these features help him considerably to be a very good student at school. Although he is only 16, he is so pragmatic and sensible that I sometimes ask him for his Advice.
I think the strongest feature in his character is his perseverance. He has reached whatever he has wanted with this enviable trait and I am sure he will be very successful in the future too.
Although he seems serious and stern, he is so kind and really has a hearth of gold. He is even emotional and sentimental.
His appearance is really fine. He is handsome and he tends to buy Expensive clothes. He is tall (about 180 centimeter) erect and in good shape.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
A COMPARISON BETWEEN TWO TEXTS
If I want to compare "The Indian character" by Francis Parkman with "Among the Osage Indians" by Washington Irving, I would say that none of them seems really reasonable. Parkman gives us a violent, uncivilized picture of Indians which seems so dark. He describes them as jealous, treacherous and taciturn people. Although I should say that in some sentences he admires them. He praises Indians' respect for their leaders and their faithfulness .He confesses that they are even ready to lay down their lives for their comrades.
How ever, Irving in "Among the Osage Indians" is too optimistic. It seems that he is so impressed by Indians' nobility that can not see their negative aspects. This is obvious especially in parts which he describes the young Osage. He just mentions that how enormous, gorgeous and brave he is. On the whole, I should say that every fair description should include both positive and negative aspects which I haven't seen in any of these two texts.
If I want to compare "The Indian character" by Francis Parkman with "Among the Osage Indians" by Washington Irving, I would say that none of them seems really reasonable. Parkman gives us a violent, uncivilized picture of Indians which seems so dark. He describes them as jealous, treacherous and taciturn people. Although I should say that in some sentences he admires them. He praises Indians' respect for their leaders and their faithfulness .He confesses that they are even ready to lay down their lives for their comrades.
How ever, Irving in "Among the Osage Indians" is too optimistic. It seems that he is so impressed by Indians' nobility that can not see their negative aspects. This is obvious especially in parts which he describes the young Osage. He just mentions that how enormous, gorgeous and brave he is. On the whole, I should say that every fair description should include both positive and negative aspects which I haven't seen in any of these two texts.
THE ASSASSINATION OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Originally, John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor and a Confederate spy from Maryland, had formulated a plan to kidnap Lincoln in exchange for the release of Confederate prisoners. After attending an April 11 speech in which Lincoln promoted voting rights for blacks, an incensed Booth changed his plans and determined to assassinate the president. Learning that the President and First Lady, together with the Grants, would be attending Ford's Theatre, he laid his plans, assigning his co-conspirators to assassinate Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward.
Without his main bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon, to whom he related his famous dream regarding his own assassination, Lincoln left to attend the play Our American Cousin on April 14, 1865. As a lone bodyguard wandered, and Lincoln sat in his state box (Box 7) in the balcony, Booth crept up behind the President and waited for the funniest line of the play, hoping the laughter would muffle the noise of the gunshot. When the laughter began, Booth jumped into the box and aimed a single-shot, round-slug .44 caliber Henry Deringer at his head, firing at point-blank range. Major Henry Rathbone momentarily grappled with Booth but was cut by Booth's knife. Booth then leapt to the stage and shouted "Sic semper tyrannis!" (Latin: "Thus always to tyrants") and escaped, despite a broken leg suffered in the leap. A twelve-day manhunt ensued, in which Booth was chased by Federal agents (under the direction of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton). He was eventually cornered in a Virginia barn house and shot, dying of his wounds soon after.
An army surgeon, Doctor Charles Leale, initially assessed Lincoln's wound as mortal. The President was taken across the street from the theater to the Petersen House, where he lay in a coma for nine hours before he died. Several physicians attended Lincoln, including U.S. Army Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes of the Army Medical Museum. Using a probe, Barnes located some fragments of Lincoln's skull and the ball lodged 6 inches (15 cm) inside his brain. Lincoln never regained consciousness and was officially pronounced dead at 7:22:10 a.m. April 15, 1865 at the age of 56. There is some disagreement among historians as to Stanton's words after Lincoln died. All agree that he began "Now he belongs to the..." with some stating he said "ages" while others believe he said "angels." After Lincoln's body was returned to the White House, a brain-only autopsy was performed, and his body was prepared for his lying in repose in the East Room. He was the first president to be assassinated or to lie in state.
The Army Medical Museum, now named the National Museum of Health and Medicine, has retained in its collection several artifacts relating to the assassination. Currently on display are the bullet that was fired from the Philadelphia Deringer pistol, the probe used by Barnes, pieces of Lincoln's skull and hair, and the surgeon's cuff stained with Lincoln's blood.
Lincoln's body was carried by train in a grand funeral procession through several states on its way back to Illinois. While much of the nation mourned him as the savior of the United States, Copperheads celebrated the death of a man they considered an unconstitutional tyrant. The Lincoln Tomb in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, is 177 feet (54 m) tall and, by 1874, was surmounted with several bronze statues of Lincoln. To prevent repeated attempts to steal Lincoln's body and hold it for ransom, Robert Todd Lincoln had Lincoln exhumed and reinterred in concrete several feet thick in 1901.
With over 120 photographs taken of him, Lincoln was the most photographed man in the United States up to the time he was assassinated.
Originally, John Wilkes Booth, a well-known actor and a Confederate spy from Maryland, had formulated a plan to kidnap Lincoln in exchange for the release of Confederate prisoners. After attending an April 11 speech in which Lincoln promoted voting rights for blacks, an incensed Booth changed his plans and determined to assassinate the president. Learning that the President and First Lady, together with the Grants, would be attending Ford's Theatre, he laid his plans, assigning his co-conspirators to assassinate Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William H. Seward.
Without his main bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon, to whom he related his famous dream regarding his own assassination, Lincoln left to attend the play Our American Cousin on April 14, 1865. As a lone bodyguard wandered, and Lincoln sat in his state box (Box 7) in the balcony, Booth crept up behind the President and waited for the funniest line of the play, hoping the laughter would muffle the noise of the gunshot. When the laughter began, Booth jumped into the box and aimed a single-shot, round-slug .44 caliber Henry Deringer at his head, firing at point-blank range. Major Henry Rathbone momentarily grappled with Booth but was cut by Booth's knife. Booth then leapt to the stage and shouted "Sic semper tyrannis!" (Latin: "Thus always to tyrants") and escaped, despite a broken leg suffered in the leap. A twelve-day manhunt ensued, in which Booth was chased by Federal agents (under the direction of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton). He was eventually cornered in a Virginia barn house and shot, dying of his wounds soon after.
An army surgeon, Doctor Charles Leale, initially assessed Lincoln's wound as mortal. The President was taken across the street from the theater to the Petersen House, where he lay in a coma for nine hours before he died. Several physicians attended Lincoln, including U.S. Army Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes of the Army Medical Museum. Using a probe, Barnes located some fragments of Lincoln's skull and the ball lodged 6 inches (15 cm) inside his brain. Lincoln never regained consciousness and was officially pronounced dead at 7:22:10 a.m. April 15, 1865 at the age of 56. There is some disagreement among historians as to Stanton's words after Lincoln died. All agree that he began "Now he belongs to the..." with some stating he said "ages" while others believe he said "angels." After Lincoln's body was returned to the White House, a brain-only autopsy was performed, and his body was prepared for his lying in repose in the East Room. He was the first president to be assassinated or to lie in state.
The Army Medical Museum, now named the National Museum of Health and Medicine, has retained in its collection several artifacts relating to the assassination. Currently on display are the bullet that was fired from the Philadelphia Deringer pistol, the probe used by Barnes, pieces of Lincoln's skull and hair, and the surgeon's cuff stained with Lincoln's blood.
Lincoln's body was carried by train in a grand funeral procession through several states on its way back to Illinois. While much of the nation mourned him as the savior of the United States, Copperheads celebrated the death of a man they considered an unconstitutional tyrant. The Lincoln Tomb in Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, is 177 feet (54 m) tall and, by 1874, was surmounted with several bronze statues of Lincoln. To prevent repeated attempts to steal Lincoln's body and hold it for ransom, Robert Todd Lincoln had Lincoln exhumed and reinterred in concrete several feet thick in 1901.
With over 120 photographs taken of him, Lincoln was the most photographed man in the United States up to the time he was assassinated.
MARK TWAIN
Mark Twain
samuel Langhorne Clemens
Born
November 30, 1835(1835-11-30)Florida, Missouri, United States
Died
April 21, 1910 (aged 74)Redding, Connecticut
Pen name
Mark Twain
Occupation
Writer, lecturer
Nationality
American
Genres
Fiction, historical fiction, children's literature, non-fiction, travel literature, satire, essay, philosophical literature, social commentary, literary criticism
Notable work(s)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Influences rtemus Ward, Charles Dickens, Thomas Paine, Alexander Macfarlane, Josh Billings
Influenced Kurt Vonnegut, Gore Vidal, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, H. L. Mencken, Hunter S. Thompson, Hal Holbrook, Jimmy Buffett, Ron Powers, Ralph Ellison, Ken Kesey
Biography
Early life
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835 to a Tennessee country merchant, John Marshall Clemens (August 11, 1798–March 24, 1847), and Jane Lampton Clemens (June 18, 1803–October 27, 1890). He was the sixth of seven children. Only three of his siblings survived childhood: his brothers Orion (July 17, 1825–December 11, 1897) and Henry (July 13, 1838–June 21, 1858) and his sister Pamela (September 19, 1827–August 31, 1904). His sister Margaret (May 31, 1830–August 17, 1839) died when Twain was four years old, and his brother Benjamin (June 8, 1832–May 12, 1842) died three years later. Another brother, Pleasant (1828–1829), died at the age of six months. He was born two weeks after the closest approach to Earth of Halley's Comet (see 1835 comment).
When Twain was four, his family moved to Hannibal a port town on the Mississippi River that would serve as the inspiration for the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.At that time, Missouri was a slave state in the Union, and young Twain became familiar with the institution of slavery, a theme he later explored in his writing.
In March 1847, when Twain was 11, his father died of pneumonia.The following year, he became a printer's apprentice. In 1851, he began working as a typesetter and contributor of articles and humorous sketches for the Hannibal Journal, a newspaper owned by his brother, Orion. When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. He joined the union and educated himself in public libraries in the evenings, finding wider sources of information than he would have at a conventional school. At 22, Twain returned to Missouri. On a voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi, the steamboat pilot, Horace E. Bixby, inspired Twain to pursue a career as a steamboat pilot; it was a richly rewarding occupation with wages set at $250 per month,equivalent to $155,000 a year today.
Because the steamboats at the time were constructed of very dry flammable wood, no lamps were allowed, making night travel a precarious endeavor. A steamboat pilot needed a vast knowledge of the ever-changing river to be able to stop at any of the hundreds of ports and wood-lots along the river banks. Twain meticulously studied 2,000 miles (3,200 km) of the Mississippi for more than two years before he received his steamboat pilot license in 1859. While training, Samuel convinced his younger brother Henry to work with him. Henry was killed on June 21, 1858, when the steamboat he was working on, the Pennsylvania, exploded. Twain had foreseen this death in a detailed dream a month earlier,which inspired his interest in parapsychology; he was an early member of the Society for Psychical Research Twain was guilt-stricken over his brother's death and held himself responsible for the rest of his life. However, he continued to work on the river and served as a river pilot until the American Civil War broke out in 1861 and traffic along the Mississippi was curtailed.
Travels and family
Missouri was a slave state and considered by many to be part of the South, but it did not join the Confederacy. When the war began, Twain and his friends formed a Confederate militia (depicted in an 1885 short story, "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed"), which drilled for only two weeks before disbanding. Twain joined his brother, Orion, who had been appointed secretary to the territorial governor of Nevada, James W. Nye, and headed west.
1874 engraving of Twain
Twain and his brother traveled for more than two weeks on a stagecoach across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, visiting the Mormon community in Salt Lake City along the way. These experiences became the basis of the book Roughing It, and provided material for The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. Twain's journey ended in the silver-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, where he became a miner. Twain failed as a miner and found work at a Virginia City newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise On February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous travel account "LETTER FROM CARSON - re: Joe Goodman; party at Gov. Johnson's; music" with "Mark Twain".Twain then traveled to San Francisco, California, where he continued as a journalist and began lecturing. He met other writers such as Bret Harte, Artemus Ward and Dan DeQuille. An assignment in Hawaii became the basis for his first lectures In 1867, a local newspaper funded a trip to the Mediterranean. During his tour of Europe and the Middle East, he wrote a popular collection of travel letters which were compiled as The Innocents Abroad in 1869.
Twain met Charles Langdon, who showed him a picture of his sister Olivia; Twain claimed to have fallen in love at first sight. They met in 1868, were engaged a year later, and married in February 1870 in Elmira, New YorkShe came from a "wealthy but liberal family", and through her he met abolitionists, "socialists, principled atheists and activists for women’s rights and social equality", including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass and the utopian socialist William Dean Howells.
The couple lived in Buffalo, New York from 1869 to 1871. Twain owned a stake in the Buffalo Express, and worked as an editor and writer. Their son Langdon died of diphtheria at 19 months.
In 1871T,wain moved his family to Hartford, Connecticut, where starting in 1873 he arranged the building of a dramatic house for them, which local admirers saved from demolition in 1927 and eventually turned into a museum focused on him. There Olivia gave birth to three daughters: Susy (1872-1896), Clara (1874-1962), and Jean (1880-1909). The couple's marriage lasted 34 years, until Olivia's death in 1904.
During his years in Hartford, Twain became friends with fellow author William Dean Howells.
Later life and death
Mark Twain in his gown (scarlet with grey sleeves and facings) for his DLitt degree, awarded to him by Oxford University.
Twain made a second tour of Europe, described in the 1880 book, A Tramp Abroad. His tour included a visit to London where, in the summer of 1900, he was the guest of newspaper proprietor Hugh Gilzean-Reid at Dollis Hill House. Twain wrote of Dollis Hill that he had "never seen any place that was so satisfactorily situated, with its noble trees and stretch of country, and everything that went to make life delightful, and all within a biscuit's throw of the metropolis of the world." He returned to America in 1900, having earned enough to pay off his debts.
In 1906, Twain began his autobiography in the North American Review. Oxford University awarded him a Doctorate in Letters a year later.
Twain outlived Jean and Susy. He passed through a period of deep depression, which began in 1896 when his favorite daughter Susy died of meningitis. Olivia's death in 1904 and Jean's death on December 24, 1909, deepened his gloom.In 1909, Twain is quoted as saying:
I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'
His prediction was accurate—Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut, one day after the comet's closest approach to Earth (see Halley's Comet, 1835 entry).
In the New York Journal, in 1897, Twain said "The report of my death was an exaggeration."
Upon hearing of Twain's death, President Taft said:“Mark Twain gave pleasure—real intellectual enjoyment—to millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasure to millions yet to come... His humor was American, but he was nearly as much appreciated by Englishmen and people of other countries as by his own countrymen. He has made an enduring part of American literature.''
Mark Twain is buried in his wife's family plot in New york.
samuel Langhorne Clemens
Born
November 30, 1835(1835-11-30)Florida, Missouri, United States
Died
April 21, 1910 (aged 74)Redding, Connecticut
Pen name
Mark Twain
Occupation
Writer, lecturer
Nationality
American
Genres
Fiction, historical fiction, children's literature, non-fiction, travel literature, satire, essay, philosophical literature, social commentary, literary criticism
Notable work(s)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Influences rtemus Ward, Charles Dickens, Thomas Paine, Alexander Macfarlane, Josh Billings
Influenced Kurt Vonnegut, Gore Vidal, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, H. L. Mencken, Hunter S. Thompson, Hal Holbrook, Jimmy Buffett, Ron Powers, Ralph Ellison, Ken Kesey
Biography
Early life
Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835 to a Tennessee country merchant, John Marshall Clemens (August 11, 1798–March 24, 1847), and Jane Lampton Clemens (June 18, 1803–October 27, 1890). He was the sixth of seven children. Only three of his siblings survived childhood: his brothers Orion (July 17, 1825–December 11, 1897) and Henry (July 13, 1838–June 21, 1858) and his sister Pamela (September 19, 1827–August 31, 1904). His sister Margaret (May 31, 1830–August 17, 1839) died when Twain was four years old, and his brother Benjamin (June 8, 1832–May 12, 1842) died three years later. Another brother, Pleasant (1828–1829), died at the age of six months. He was born two weeks after the closest approach to Earth of Halley's Comet (see 1835 comment).
When Twain was four, his family moved to Hannibal a port town on the Mississippi River that would serve as the inspiration for the fictional town of St. Petersburg in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.At that time, Missouri was a slave state in the Union, and young Twain became familiar with the institution of slavery, a theme he later explored in his writing.
In March 1847, when Twain was 11, his father died of pneumonia.The following year, he became a printer's apprentice. In 1851, he began working as a typesetter and contributor of articles and humorous sketches for the Hannibal Journal, a newspaper owned by his brother, Orion. When he was 18, he left Hannibal and worked as a printer in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. He joined the union and educated himself in public libraries in the evenings, finding wider sources of information than he would have at a conventional school. At 22, Twain returned to Missouri. On a voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi, the steamboat pilot, Horace E. Bixby, inspired Twain to pursue a career as a steamboat pilot; it was a richly rewarding occupation with wages set at $250 per month,equivalent to $155,000 a year today.
Because the steamboats at the time were constructed of very dry flammable wood, no lamps were allowed, making night travel a precarious endeavor. A steamboat pilot needed a vast knowledge of the ever-changing river to be able to stop at any of the hundreds of ports and wood-lots along the river banks. Twain meticulously studied 2,000 miles (3,200 km) of the Mississippi for more than two years before he received his steamboat pilot license in 1859. While training, Samuel convinced his younger brother Henry to work with him. Henry was killed on June 21, 1858, when the steamboat he was working on, the Pennsylvania, exploded. Twain had foreseen this death in a detailed dream a month earlier,which inspired his interest in parapsychology; he was an early member of the Society for Psychical Research Twain was guilt-stricken over his brother's death and held himself responsible for the rest of his life. However, he continued to work on the river and served as a river pilot until the American Civil War broke out in 1861 and traffic along the Mississippi was curtailed.
Travels and family
Missouri was a slave state and considered by many to be part of the South, but it did not join the Confederacy. When the war began, Twain and his friends formed a Confederate militia (depicted in an 1885 short story, "The Private History of a Campaign That Failed"), which drilled for only two weeks before disbanding. Twain joined his brother, Orion, who had been appointed secretary to the territorial governor of Nevada, James W. Nye, and headed west.
1874 engraving of Twain
Twain and his brother traveled for more than two weeks on a stagecoach across the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, visiting the Mormon community in Salt Lake City along the way. These experiences became the basis of the book Roughing It, and provided material for The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. Twain's journey ended in the silver-mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, where he became a miner. Twain failed as a miner and found work at a Virginia City newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise On February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous travel account "LETTER FROM CARSON - re: Joe Goodman; party at Gov. Johnson's; music" with "Mark Twain".Twain then traveled to San Francisco, California, where he continued as a journalist and began lecturing. He met other writers such as Bret Harte, Artemus Ward and Dan DeQuille. An assignment in Hawaii became the basis for his first lectures In 1867, a local newspaper funded a trip to the Mediterranean. During his tour of Europe and the Middle East, he wrote a popular collection of travel letters which were compiled as The Innocents Abroad in 1869.
Twain met Charles Langdon, who showed him a picture of his sister Olivia; Twain claimed to have fallen in love at first sight. They met in 1868, were engaged a year later, and married in February 1870 in Elmira, New YorkShe came from a "wealthy but liberal family", and through her he met abolitionists, "socialists, principled atheists and activists for women’s rights and social equality", including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass and the utopian socialist William Dean Howells.
The couple lived in Buffalo, New York from 1869 to 1871. Twain owned a stake in the Buffalo Express, and worked as an editor and writer. Their son Langdon died of diphtheria at 19 months.
In 1871T,wain moved his family to Hartford, Connecticut, where starting in 1873 he arranged the building of a dramatic house for them, which local admirers saved from demolition in 1927 and eventually turned into a museum focused on him. There Olivia gave birth to three daughters: Susy (1872-1896), Clara (1874-1962), and Jean (1880-1909). The couple's marriage lasted 34 years, until Olivia's death in 1904.
During his years in Hartford, Twain became friends with fellow author William Dean Howells.
Later life and death
Mark Twain in his gown (scarlet with grey sleeves and facings) for his DLitt degree, awarded to him by Oxford University.
Twain made a second tour of Europe, described in the 1880 book, A Tramp Abroad. His tour included a visit to London where, in the summer of 1900, he was the guest of newspaper proprietor Hugh Gilzean-Reid at Dollis Hill House. Twain wrote of Dollis Hill that he had "never seen any place that was so satisfactorily situated, with its noble trees and stretch of country, and everything that went to make life delightful, and all within a biscuit's throw of the metropolis of the world." He returned to America in 1900, having earned enough to pay off his debts.
In 1906, Twain began his autobiography in the North American Review. Oxford University awarded him a Doctorate in Letters a year later.
Twain outlived Jean and Susy. He passed through a period of deep depression, which began in 1896 when his favorite daughter Susy died of meningitis. Olivia's death in 1904 and Jean's death on December 24, 1909, deepened his gloom.In 1909, Twain is quoted as saying:
I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'
His prediction was accurate—Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut, one day after the comet's closest approach to Earth (see Halley's Comet, 1835 entry).
In the New York Journal, in 1897, Twain said "The report of my death was an exaggeration."
Upon hearing of Twain's death, President Taft said:“Mark Twain gave pleasure—real intellectual enjoyment—to millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasure to millions yet to come... His humor was American, but he was nearly as much appreciated by Englishmen and people of other countries as by his own countrymen. He has made an enduring part of American literature.''
Mark Twain is buried in his wife's family plot in New york.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
MARK TWAIN
MARK TWAIN'S PENNAME
Twain used different pennames before deciding on Mark twain.He signed humorous and imaginative sketches ''Josh'' until 1863.Additionally,he used the penname "Thomas Jefferson snodgrass" for a series of humerous letteres.
He maintained that his primary penname came from his years working on Mississippi riverboat,where tho fathoms, a depthe indicating ''safe Water'' for the boat to float over,was measured on the sounding line.A fathom is a maritime unit of depth,equivalent to two yards(approximatly 1.8 meter) "twain'' is an archaic term for'' two ''.The river boatman's cry was mark twain or,more fully,''by the mark twain'',meaning''according to the mark[on the line],[the depth is]two [fathoms],''that is,there are 12 feet of water under the boat and it is safe to pass.
Twain used different pennames before deciding on Mark twain.He signed humorous and imaginative sketches ''Josh'' until 1863.Additionally,he used the penname "Thomas Jefferson snodgrass" for a series of humerous letteres.
He maintained that his primary penname came from his years working on Mississippi riverboat,where tho fathoms, a depthe indicating ''safe Water'' for the boat to float over,was measured on the sounding line.A fathom is a maritime unit of depth,equivalent to two yards(approximatly 1.8 meter) "twain'' is an archaic term for'' two ''.The river boatman's cry was mark twain or,more fully,''by the mark twain'',meaning''according to the mark[on the line],[the depth is]two [fathoms],''that is,there are 12 feet of water under the boat and it is safe to pass.
BIOGRAPHY
Biography
biography (from the Greek words bios meaning "life", and graphos meaning "write") is an account of a person's life, usually published in the form of a book or essay, or in some other form, such as a film. An autobiography (auto, meaning "self", giving self-biography) is a biography by the same person it is about. A biography is more than a list of impersonal facts (like birth, education, work, relationships and death), it also portrays the subject's experience of those events. Unlike a profile or curriculum vitae (resume), a biography presents the subject's story, highlighting various aspects of his or her life, including intimate details of experiences, and may include an analysis of the subject's personality.
A work is biographical if it covers all of a person's life. As such, biographical works are usually non-fiction, but fiction can also be used to portray a person's life. One in-depth form of biographical coverage is called legacy writing. Together, all biographical works form the genre known as biography, in literature, film, and other forms of media.
Early forms
The first known biographies were written by scribes commissioned by the various rulers of antiquity: ancient Assyria, ancient Babylonia, ancient Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia, among others. Such biographies tended to be chiseled into stone or clay tablets, a method called cuneiform.
Perhaps the drawings in caves can be considered the first biographies. Some of them appear to relate events such as a successful hunt. The artists (biographers?) and viewers would know (by clues that escape us in the drawings) who was being honored.This also tells the accounts of a persons life.
Classical forms
Ancient Greeks developed the biographical tradition which we have inherited, although until the 5th century AD, when the word 'biographia' first appears, in Damascius' Life of Isodorus, biographical pieces were called simply "lives" (βιοι: "bioi"). It is quite likely that the Greeks were drawing on a pre-existing eastern tradition; certainly Herodotus' Histories contains more detailed biographical information on Persian kings and subjects than on anyone else, implying he had a Persian source for it.
The earliest surviving pieces which we would identify as biographical are Isocrates' Life of Evagoras and Xenophon's Life of Agesilaos, both from the fifth century BC. Both identified themselves as encomia, or works of praise, and that biography was regarded as a discrete entity from historiography is evidenced by the fact that Xenophon treated King Agesilaos of Sparta twice in his works, once in the above-mentioned encomium and once in his Greek History; evidently the two genres were conceived as making different demands of authors who enrolled in them. Xenophon could present his Cyropaedia, an account of the childhood of the Persian King Cyrus the Great now regarded as so fabulous that it falls rather into a novelistic tradition than a biographical one, as a serious work, without any disclaimers or caveats.
Whereas Thucydides set the benchmark for a historiographical tradition comprising 'conclusions ... drawn from proofs quoted ... [which] may safely be relied upon' (Thuc. 1.21), and offering little explicit judgement on the people with whom he dealt, biographers were quite often more concerned with drawing a moral point from their investigations of their subjects. Parallel Lives by Plutarch, a Greek writing under the Roman empire, is a series of short biographies of eminent men, ancient and contemporary, arranged in pairs comprising one Greek, one Roman, in order that a broad educative point might be extraced from the comparison (for example Mark Antony and Demetrius were paradigms of tyranny, Lysander and Sulla examples of great men degenerating into blood-thirsty corruption).
However, although their moralising approach is not in fashion in the current intellectual climate, Greek biographies still have much to offer the modern reader, and for the most part it is reasonable to assume that while authors may have suppressed details which did not fall in with the general theme which they wished to convey, they are unlikely to have fabricated much. Not least, they were instrumental in developing the modern idea of the person. The traditional Greek attitude to individuals was to 'reduce them to types'; the Peripatetic tradition records various categories into which men might fall: the flatterer, the superstitious man and so on. Greek rhetorical handbooks give advice on 'ethopoia', that is creating a character, one of a recognised type, to win favour in the law courts.
The biographical tradition does draw on these types, but it also gives explicit recognition to the importance of individual ideosyncrasies in defining a man, and places the emphasis firmly on a man's personality rather than merely listing his accomplishments. As Plutarch says in the introduction to his Life of Alexander the Great, 'in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue and vice, but a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation than battles where thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities'. Thus the individual is recognised as having some value and interest irrespective of the impact of his actions on the broader sweep of history.
Under the Roman Empire, the biographical and historiographical traditions converged somewhat, likely due to the nature of government, whereby the state was dominated by a single emperor with totalitarian power and whose character and actions set the tone for the period; Tacitus's History and his Annals, as well as Dio's History contain much of the same material as the biographer Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Caesars. However, although Tacitus in particular was extremely critical of the regime, his disapproval emerges in subtle characterisation and arrangement of his material, in contrast with Suetonius' vicious authorial comment.
Middle Ages and Renaissance
The Early Middle Ages (AD 400 to 1450) saw a decline in awareness of classical culture. During this time, the only repositories of knowledge and records of early history in Europe was the Roman Catholic Church. Hermits, monks and priests used this historic period to write the first modern biographies. Their subjects were usually restricted to church fathers, martyrs, popes and saints. Their works were meant to be inspirational to people, vehicles for conversion to Christianity. See hagiography. One significant example of biography from this period which does not exactly fit into that mold is the life of Charlemagne as written by his courtier Einhard.
By the late Middle Ages, biographies became less church-oriented as biographies of kings, knights and tyrants began to appear. The most famous of these such biographies was 'Le Morte d'Arthur' by Sir Thomas Malory. The book was an account of the life of the fabled King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.
Following Malory, the new emphasis on humanism during the Renaissance promoted a focus on secular subjects such as artists and poets, and encouraged writing in the vernacular. Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550) was a landmark biography focusing on secular lives. Vasari created celebrities of his subjects, as the Lives became an early "best seller." Two other developments are noteworthy: the development of the printing press in the fifteenth century and the gradual increase in literacy.
Biographies in the English language began appearing during the reign of Henry VIII. John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), better known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, essentially was the first dictionary of biography, followed by Thomas Fuller’s The History of the Worthies of England (1662), with a distinct focus on public life.
Modern biography
The "Golden Age" of English biography emerged in the late eighteenth century, the century in which the terms "biography" and "autobiography" entered the English lexicon. The classic works of the period were Samuel Johnson's Critic material and letting the subject "speak for itself." While Boswell compiled, Samuel Johnson composed. Johnson did not follow a chronological narration of the subject's life but used anecdotes and incidents selectively. Johnson rejected the notion that facts revealed truth. He suggested that biographers should seek their subject in "domestic privacies", to find little known facts or anecdotes which revealed character. (Casper, 1999)
The romantic biographers disputed many of Johnson's judgments. Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (1781-88) exploited the romantic point of view and the confessional mode. The tradition of testimony and confession was brought to the New World by Puritan and Quaker memoirists and journal-keepers where the form continued to be influential. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography (1791) would provide the archetype for the American success story. (Stone, 1982) Autobiography would remain an influential form of biographical writing.
Generally American biography followed the English model, while incorporating Thomas Carlyle's view that biography was a part of history. Carlyle asserted that the lives of great human beings were essential to understanding society and its institutions. While the historical impulse would remain a strong element in early American biography, American writers carved out their own distinct approach. What emerged was a rather didactic form of biography which sought to shape individual character of the reader in the process of defining national character. (Casper, 1999)
The distinction between mass biography and literary biography which had formed by the middle of the nineteenth century reflected a breach between high culture and middle-class culture. This division would endure for the remainder of the century. Biography began to flower thanks to new publishing technologies and an expanding reading public. This revolution in publishing made books available to a larger audience of readers. Almost ten times as many American biographies appeared from 1840 to 1860 than had appeared in the first two decades of the century. In addition, affordable paperback editions of popular biographies were published for the first time. Also, American periodicals began publishing series of biographical sketches. (Casper, 1999) The topical emphasis shifted from republican heroes to self-made men and women.
Much of late 19th-century biography remained formulaic. Notably, few autobiographies had been written in the 19th century. The following century witnessed a renaissance of autobiography beginning with Booker T. Washington's, Up From Slavery (1901) and followed by Henry Adams' Education (1907), a chronicle of self-defined failure which ran counter to the predominant American success story. The publication of socially significant autobiographies by both men and women began to flourish. (Stone, 1982)
The authority of psychology and sociology was ascendant and would make its mark on the new century’s biographies. (Stone, 1982) The demise of the "great man" theory of history was indicative of the emerging mindset. Human behavior would be explained through Darwinian theories. "Sociological" biographies conceived of their subjects' actions as the result of the environment, and tended to downplay individuality. The development of psychoanalysis led to a more penetrating and comprehensive understanding of the biographical subject, and induced biographers to give more emphasis to childhood and adolescence. Clearly, psychological ideas were changing the way Americans read and wrote biographies, as a culture of autobiography developed in which the telling of one's own story became a form of therapy. (Casper, 1999)
The conventional concept of national heroes and narratives of success disappeared in the obsession with psychological explorations of personality. The new school of biography featured iconoclasts, scientific analysts, and fictional biographers. This wave included Lytton Strachey, André Maurois, and Emil Ludwig among others. Strachey's biographies had an influence similar to that which Samuel Johnson had enjoyed earlier. In the 1920s and '30s, biographical writers sought to capitalize on Strachey's popularity and imitate his style. Robert Graves (I, Claudius, 1934) stood out among those following Strachey's model of "debunking biographies." The trend in literary biography was accompanied in popular biography by a sort of "celebrity voyeurism." in the early decades of the century. This latter form's appeal to readers was based on curiosity more than morality or patriotism.
By World War I, cheap hard-cover reprints had become popular. The decades of the 1920s witnessed a biographical "boom." In 1929, nearly 700 biographies were published in the United States, and the first dictionary of American biography appeared. In the decade that followed, numerous biographies continued to be published despite the economic depression. They reached a growing audience through inexpensive formats and via public libraries.
According to the scholar Caroyln Heilbrun, women's biographies were revolutionized during the second wave of feminist activism in the 1970s. At this time women began to be portrayed more accurately, even if it downplayed the achievements or integrity of a man (Heilbrun 12).
Multi-media forms
With the technological advancements created in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, multi-media forms of biography became much more popular than literary forms. ? of personality that written forms could not. The popularity of these forms of biography culminated in the creation of such cable and satellite television networks as A&E, The Biography Channel, The History Channel and History International. Along with documentary film biographies, Hollywood produced numerous commercial films based on the lives of famous people.
More recently, CD-ROM and online biographies are appearing. Unlike books and films, they often do not tell a chronological story; instead, they are archives of many discrete media elements related to an individual person, including video clips, photographs, and text articles. Media scholar Lev Manovich says that such archives exemplify the database form, allowing users to navigate the materials in many ways (Manovich 220).
biography (from the Greek words bios meaning "life", and graphos meaning "write") is an account of a person's life, usually published in the form of a book or essay, or in some other form, such as a film. An autobiography (auto, meaning "self", giving self-biography) is a biography by the same person it is about. A biography is more than a list of impersonal facts (like birth, education, work, relationships and death), it also portrays the subject's experience of those events. Unlike a profile or curriculum vitae (resume), a biography presents the subject's story, highlighting various aspects of his or her life, including intimate details of experiences, and may include an analysis of the subject's personality.
A work is biographical if it covers all of a person's life. As such, biographical works are usually non-fiction, but fiction can also be used to portray a person's life. One in-depth form of biographical coverage is called legacy writing. Together, all biographical works form the genre known as biography, in literature, film, and other forms of media.
Early forms
The first known biographies were written by scribes commissioned by the various rulers of antiquity: ancient Assyria, ancient Babylonia, ancient Egypt, ancient Mesopotamia, among others. Such biographies tended to be chiseled into stone or clay tablets, a method called cuneiform.
Perhaps the drawings in caves can be considered the first biographies. Some of them appear to relate events such as a successful hunt. The artists (biographers?) and viewers would know (by clues that escape us in the drawings) who was being honored.This also tells the accounts of a persons life.
Classical forms
Ancient Greeks developed the biographical tradition which we have inherited, although until the 5th century AD, when the word 'biographia' first appears, in Damascius' Life of Isodorus, biographical pieces were called simply "lives" (βιοι: "bioi"). It is quite likely that the Greeks were drawing on a pre-existing eastern tradition; certainly Herodotus' Histories contains more detailed biographical information on Persian kings and subjects than on anyone else, implying he had a Persian source for it.
The earliest surviving pieces which we would identify as biographical are Isocrates' Life of Evagoras and Xenophon's Life of Agesilaos, both from the fifth century BC. Both identified themselves as encomia, or works of praise, and that biography was regarded as a discrete entity from historiography is evidenced by the fact that Xenophon treated King Agesilaos of Sparta twice in his works, once in the above-mentioned encomium and once in his Greek History; evidently the two genres were conceived as making different demands of authors who enrolled in them. Xenophon could present his Cyropaedia, an account of the childhood of the Persian King Cyrus the Great now regarded as so fabulous that it falls rather into a novelistic tradition than a biographical one, as a serious work, without any disclaimers or caveats.
Whereas Thucydides set the benchmark for a historiographical tradition comprising 'conclusions ... drawn from proofs quoted ... [which] may safely be relied upon' (Thuc. 1.21), and offering little explicit judgement on the people with whom he dealt, biographers were quite often more concerned with drawing a moral point from their investigations of their subjects. Parallel Lives by Plutarch, a Greek writing under the Roman empire, is a series of short biographies of eminent men, ancient and contemporary, arranged in pairs comprising one Greek, one Roman, in order that a broad educative point might be extraced from the comparison (for example Mark Antony and Demetrius were paradigms of tyranny, Lysander and Sulla examples of great men degenerating into blood-thirsty corruption).
However, although their moralising approach is not in fashion in the current intellectual climate, Greek biographies still have much to offer the modern reader, and for the most part it is reasonable to assume that while authors may have suppressed details which did not fall in with the general theme which they wished to convey, they are unlikely to have fabricated much. Not least, they were instrumental in developing the modern idea of the person. The traditional Greek attitude to individuals was to 'reduce them to types'; the Peripatetic tradition records various categories into which men might fall: the flatterer, the superstitious man and so on. Greek rhetorical handbooks give advice on 'ethopoia', that is creating a character, one of a recognised type, to win favour in the law courts.
The biographical tradition does draw on these types, but it also gives explicit recognition to the importance of individual ideosyncrasies in defining a man, and places the emphasis firmly on a man's personality rather than merely listing his accomplishments. As Plutarch says in the introduction to his Life of Alexander the Great, 'in the most illustrious deeds there is not always a manifestation of virtue and vice, but a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation than battles where thousands fall, or the greatest armaments, or sieges of cities'. Thus the individual is recognised as having some value and interest irrespective of the impact of his actions on the broader sweep of history.
Under the Roman Empire, the biographical and historiographical traditions converged somewhat, likely due to the nature of government, whereby the state was dominated by a single emperor with totalitarian power and whose character and actions set the tone for the period; Tacitus's History and his Annals, as well as Dio's History contain much of the same material as the biographer Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Caesars. However, although Tacitus in particular was extremely critical of the regime, his disapproval emerges in subtle characterisation and arrangement of his material, in contrast with Suetonius' vicious authorial comment.
Middle Ages and Renaissance
The Early Middle Ages (AD 400 to 1450) saw a decline in awareness of classical culture. During this time, the only repositories of knowledge and records of early history in Europe was the Roman Catholic Church. Hermits, monks and priests used this historic period to write the first modern biographies. Their subjects were usually restricted to church fathers, martyrs, popes and saints. Their works were meant to be inspirational to people, vehicles for conversion to Christianity. See hagiography. One significant example of biography from this period which does not exactly fit into that mold is the life of Charlemagne as written by his courtier Einhard.
By the late Middle Ages, biographies became less church-oriented as biographies of kings, knights and tyrants began to appear. The most famous of these such biographies was 'Le Morte d'Arthur' by Sir Thomas Malory. The book was an account of the life of the fabled King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.
Following Malory, the new emphasis on humanism during the Renaissance promoted a focus on secular subjects such as artists and poets, and encouraged writing in the vernacular. Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (1550) was a landmark biography focusing on secular lives. Vasari created celebrities of his subjects, as the Lives became an early "best seller." Two other developments are noteworthy: the development of the printing press in the fifteenth century and the gradual increase in literacy.
Biographies in the English language began appearing during the reign of Henry VIII. John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1563), better known as Foxe's Book of Martyrs, essentially was the first dictionary of biography, followed by Thomas Fuller’s The History of the Worthies of England (1662), with a distinct focus on public life.
Modern biography
The "Golden Age" of English biography emerged in the late eighteenth century, the century in which the terms "biography" and "autobiography" entered the English lexicon. The classic works of the period were Samuel Johnson's Critic material and letting the subject "speak for itself." While Boswell compiled, Samuel Johnson composed. Johnson did not follow a chronological narration of the subject's life but used anecdotes and incidents selectively. Johnson rejected the notion that facts revealed truth. He suggested that biographers should seek their subject in "domestic privacies", to find little known facts or anecdotes which revealed character. (Casper, 1999)
The romantic biographers disputed many of Johnson's judgments. Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (1781-88) exploited the romantic point of view and the confessional mode. The tradition of testimony and confession was brought to the New World by Puritan and Quaker memoirists and journal-keepers where the form continued to be influential. Benjamin Franklin's autobiography (1791) would provide the archetype for the American success story. (Stone, 1982) Autobiography would remain an influential form of biographical writing.
Generally American biography followed the English model, while incorporating Thomas Carlyle's view that biography was a part of history. Carlyle asserted that the lives of great human beings were essential to understanding society and its institutions. While the historical impulse would remain a strong element in early American biography, American writers carved out their own distinct approach. What emerged was a rather didactic form of biography which sought to shape individual character of the reader in the process of defining national character. (Casper, 1999)
The distinction between mass biography and literary biography which had formed by the middle of the nineteenth century reflected a breach between high culture and middle-class culture. This division would endure for the remainder of the century. Biography began to flower thanks to new publishing technologies and an expanding reading public. This revolution in publishing made books available to a larger audience of readers. Almost ten times as many American biographies appeared from 1840 to 1860 than had appeared in the first two decades of the century. In addition, affordable paperback editions of popular biographies were published for the first time. Also, American periodicals began publishing series of biographical sketches. (Casper, 1999) The topical emphasis shifted from republican heroes to self-made men and women.
Much of late 19th-century biography remained formulaic. Notably, few autobiographies had been written in the 19th century. The following century witnessed a renaissance of autobiography beginning with Booker T. Washington's, Up From Slavery (1901) and followed by Henry Adams' Education (1907), a chronicle of self-defined failure which ran counter to the predominant American success story. The publication of socially significant autobiographies by both men and women began to flourish. (Stone, 1982)
The authority of psychology and sociology was ascendant and would make its mark on the new century’s biographies. (Stone, 1982) The demise of the "great man" theory of history was indicative of the emerging mindset. Human behavior would be explained through Darwinian theories. "Sociological" biographies conceived of their subjects' actions as the result of the environment, and tended to downplay individuality. The development of psychoanalysis led to a more penetrating and comprehensive understanding of the biographical subject, and induced biographers to give more emphasis to childhood and adolescence. Clearly, psychological ideas were changing the way Americans read and wrote biographies, as a culture of autobiography developed in which the telling of one's own story became a form of therapy. (Casper, 1999)
The conventional concept of national heroes and narratives of success disappeared in the obsession with psychological explorations of personality. The new school of biography featured iconoclasts, scientific analysts, and fictional biographers. This wave included Lytton Strachey, André Maurois, and Emil Ludwig among others. Strachey's biographies had an influence similar to that which Samuel Johnson had enjoyed earlier. In the 1920s and '30s, biographical writers sought to capitalize on Strachey's popularity and imitate his style. Robert Graves (I, Claudius, 1934) stood out among those following Strachey's model of "debunking biographies." The trend in literary biography was accompanied in popular biography by a sort of "celebrity voyeurism." in the early decades of the century. This latter form's appeal to readers was based on curiosity more than morality or patriotism.
By World War I, cheap hard-cover reprints had become popular. The decades of the 1920s witnessed a biographical "boom." In 1929, nearly 700 biographies were published in the United States, and the first dictionary of American biography appeared. In the decade that followed, numerous biographies continued to be published despite the economic depression. They reached a growing audience through inexpensive formats and via public libraries.
According to the scholar Caroyln Heilbrun, women's biographies were revolutionized during the second wave of feminist activism in the 1970s. At this time women began to be portrayed more accurately, even if it downplayed the achievements or integrity of a man (Heilbrun 12).
Multi-media forms
With the technological advancements created in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, multi-media forms of biography became much more popular than literary forms. ? of personality that written forms could not. The popularity of these forms of biography culminated in the creation of such cable and satellite television networks as A&E, The Biography Channel, The History Channel and History International. Along with documentary film biographies, Hollywood produced numerous commercial films based on the lives of famous people.
More recently, CD-ROM and online biographies are appearing. Unlike books and films, they often do not tell a chronological story; instead, they are archives of many discrete media elements related to an individual person, including video clips, photographs, and text articles. Media scholar Lev Manovich says that such archives exemplify the database form, allowing users to navigate the materials in many ways (Manovich 220).
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Autobiography of mine
About twenty years ago (1988) in a hot July night I was born in Tehran. I was a weak and vulnerable infant who used to cry a lot but gradually I became better. For about two years, I went to kindergarten and like many children in Iran I went to school when I was six. Although I entered the primary school with great enthusiasm, as a teenager I used to hate school (especially high school). Actually, school's lessons and atmosphere were always different from my expectations. When I was 18, I fought against a monster called entrance examination and you can't imagine how happy I was when I won.
Now I am twenty and much happier than before, because I am studying what I have always wanted and that is English Literature.
Sepideh Bagheri
About twenty years ago (1988) in a hot July night I was born in Tehran. I was a weak and vulnerable infant who used to cry a lot but gradually I became better. For about two years, I went to kindergarten and like many children in Iran I went to school when I was six. Although I entered the primary school with great enthusiasm, as a teenager I used to hate school (especially high school). Actually, school's lessons and atmosphere were always different from my expectations. When I was 18, I fought against a monster called entrance examination and you can't imagine how happy I was when I won.
Now I am twenty and much happier than before, because I am studying what I have always wanted and that is English Literature.
Sepideh Bagheri
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