Honors English 11 Document Based Essay Question

Directions: The following question requires you to construct a coherent essay that integrated your interpretation of Documents A-L and your knowledge of the topic referred to in the question. High scores will be earned only by essays that both cite key pieces of evidence from the documents and draw on outside knowledge of the topic.

Mark Twain was known as America’s premier humorist of the 19th Century. He was also a much loved author, lecturer, and celebrity during the late 1800s and early 1900s. In 1890, a critical reviewer of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn wrote, “Mark Twain is a humorist or nothing.” In light of the following documents and your knowledge of Mark Twain, to what extent is Mark Twain just a “mere humorist” or a social critic?

Document A Source: President William H. Taft, 1910--a tribute to Mark Twain after he died. "Mark Twain gave real intellectual enjoyment to millions, and his works will continue to give such pleasure to millions yet to come. He never wrote a line that a father could not read to a daughter." Document B

“Mark Twain” “America’s Best Humorist” 1

Document C Source: Matthew Arnold, British poet and culture critic, 1880s From A Word About America, 1882 "The…humor of Mr. Mark Twain, so attractive to the Philistine [i.e. lacking or hostile in culture]of the more [light-hearted] and light type both here and in America, [a] French critic fixes upon as literature exactly expressing a people of this type, and of no higher. 'In spite of all its primary education,' he says, 'America is still, from the intellectual point of view, a very rude and primitive soil, only to be cultivated by violent methods. These childish and half-savage minds are not moved except by very elementary narratives composed without art, in which burlesque and melodrama, vulgarity and eccentricity, are combined in strong doses.'" From Civilization in the United States, 1888: “If there be a discipline in which the Americans are wanting it is the discipline of awe and respect.” “In truth everything is against distinction in America, and against the sense of elevation to be gained through admiring and respecting it. The glorification of 'the average man,' who is quite a religion with statesmen and publicists there, is against it. The addiction to 'the funny man,' [i.e. Mark Twain] who is a national misfortune there, is against it. Above all, the newspapers are against it.”

Document D Source: Mark Twain, The American Claimant (and response to Matthew Arnold) “A discriminating irreverence* is the creator and protector of human liberty.” *a carefully chosen lack of respect

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Document E Source: Roy Blunt, Jr. “America’s Original Superstar.” Time Magazine. July 14, 2008 “Whether Twain was talking about racism at home, the foreign misadventures of the Western powers of the excess of the era of greed he initially flourished in after the Civil War, his target was always human folly and hypocrisy….”

Document F Source: - Mark Twain, a Biography, quoted from the Galaxy Magazine “I shall not often meddle with politics, because we have a political Editor who is already excellent and only needs to serve a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect.” Document G Source: Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain “In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at secondhand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.”

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Document H Source: Mark Twain, New York Herald, 15 October 1900 “I have read carefully the treaty of Paris [between the United States and Spain], and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem.... And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.”

Document I Source: MINNEAPOLIS TRIBUNE, 14 February 1901

“Better quit your foolin’, Mark, and go back to work at your trade.”

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Document J Source: Mark Twain, Letter to Helene Picard, 22 February 1902 “Yes, you are right -- I am a moralist in disguise; it gets me into heaps of trouble when I go thrashing around in political questions.” Document K Source: "Moralist in disguise." Illustration from AMERICAN EXAMINER Magazine published shortly after Clemens' death in 1910. From the Dave Thomson collection.

Document L Source: H. L. Mencken, Review of Albert Bigelow Paine's biography of Mark Twain, in The Smart Set (February 1913). "I believe that Mark Twain had a clearer vision of life, that he came nearer to its elementals and was less deceived by its false appearances, than any other American who has ever presumed to manufacture generalizations, not excepting Emerson. I believe that he was the true father of our national literature, the first genuinely American artist of the royal blood."

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