Two Views of the River

I have once again read the beginning of the story where they talk about Mark Twain and his type of writing and his life. I never really knew that the part that I read had that much information. I did not really know that Mark Twain had changed his name after his real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Twain 496). Here is a little bit of information on Mark Twain and his lifetime. "Samuel Clemens spent his early life in Missouri, chiefly in Hannibal on the west bank of the Mississippi River. Life there was full of adventure, but the death of Clemens's father when the boy was just eleven forced him to curtail his childhood escapades and his schooling in order to work as a printer's apprentice" (Twain 496). I would really like to focus on when the death of his father came around. If my father died at that early of an age, I would not know what to do about it. Twain was forced to work in a printing company. This company that he worked at probably gave him ideas as to continue his career in writing. To this day, there are still people reading his books and I even enjoyed reading this story that he wrote.

I find that Thoreau and Twain would have fit in nicely with each other because they both loved to talk about nature and the things around it. They loved to talk about and describe the environment and all sorts of things around them. Like in Twain's story "Two Views of the River", Mark Twain describes the river very intensely in this story, describing it as it is turning to the color of "blood, gold and also black and conspicuous when a log had floated in his view (Twain 504). Mark Twain did a great job with the description of nature in this story and he would of fit nicely with Thoreau's writings because they both looked at the beauty of nature and all the things around it (Harding). Overall, both of the authors really went into descriptive detail on each of their stories about nature and how they saw it.

Bibliography

Harding, Walter. A Thoreau Handbook by Walter Harding: pp. 131-173 (New York University Press, 1959). © 1959 by New York University Press. Quoted as "Thoreau's Ideas" in Harold Bloom, ed. Henry David Thoreau, Bloom's BioCritiques. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishing, 2003. Bloom's Literary Reference Online. Facts On File, Inc. 26 Feb. 2012.

Twain, Mark. "Before You Read." Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 496. Print.

Twain, Mark. "Two Views of the River." Comp. Jeffrey D. Wilhelm, Ph.D. and Douglas Fisher, Ph.D. Glencoe Literature. American Literature ed. Columbus: McGraw-Hill Companies, 2009. 504-505. Print.