The American（美国人）(Christopher Newman, a self-made millionaire leaves his business behind and goes to Europe in search of better cultivation of himself and of a wife of nobility. He is intelligent, good-looking and wealthy. Despite all these, he can not marry the girl he has chosen and he is even fooled by the family, because he is thought to be ignorant in the eyes of the family.who are very proud of their origin. Later he learns a secret of the family with which he can use to force them to accept the marriage. But, Newman decides not to do so, he is regarded as American model with his generosity.
The Ambassadors （专使）(a comedy of American and European manners, stresses mutual understanding and sympathy) (Stretcher, a middle-aged man is sent to Paris by a wealthy widow to take back her son who is so fascinated with European culture to return to America.. But Stretcher is eventually convinced that Paris is the place both for the young man and for himself, so he decides to stay in Paris without marrying the mother.
The Golden Bowl （金碗）
The Wings of the Dove （鸽翼）

Chapter Nine 
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
The humorist, the social critic, the pessimist
He was brought up in the small town of Missouri on the Mississippi River. When he was twelve, his father died and he had to leave school. He tried different jobs: a printer’s apprentice, a silver miner, a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. ( His pen name Mark twain come from his experience here, which means “water is deep enough  for a boat to go through ). These experiences, especially his life on Mississippi provided him with ample material for fiction. Many of his fictions are based on his life here. He married a girl from a well-to-do family. The marriage was a happy one. He was the few writers in America who enjoyed mutual understanding with their wives.
  He was known as a local colorist concerning themselves with presenting and interpreting the local characters of their region.
 He first became known as a writer of humorous western tales. In his early years, tone of his fiction is humorous, light, and optimism. But gradually, he turned to bitter satire and pessimism. Some critics link this change with the tragic events of his latter life: the failure of his investment, the death of his beloved wife and two daughters. But the basic reason should be the darkening life..
His frontier tales: The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County（卡拉维拉斯县驰名的跳蛙）.The story is a humorous classic. (Coleman with his jumping frog bet an apparently stranger $50. As the stranger had no frog, Coleman got one for him. But in the meantime, the stranger filled Coleman’s frog shot and the frog couldn’t jump. The stranger’s frog won.
His first novel, The Gilded Age(镀金时代), was an artistic failure, but it gave its name to the post-bellum period. It pictured America as becoming corrupt because it had sacrificed the true ideas of virtue for destructive notion, and satirized the legislative corruption, industrial free-enterprise and speculation. So the third quarter of the 19th in the US was not a golden age, but a gilded age.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer（汤姆.索耶历险记）: A story written for boys, full of horror and joys of childhood, and it has been banned for a long time in US. ( feeling disgusted with the boring school life and hypocritical religious rituals in church, tom Sawyer makes trouble everywhere, trying to seek pleasure from playing practical-joke, and takes adventures here and there. It makes a striking contrast between colorful childhood life and the monotonous social life.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn （哈克.费恩历险记）. His masterwork.  The story relates how Huck, floating along with Jim and helping him as best as he can, changes his mind, his prejudice about Black people, and comes to accept Jim as a man and as close friend as well.
Huck starts by believing that Blacks are by nature lower than whites. So at first he cannot see Jim as a proper human being. Through their escape down the river, he gets to know Jim better and becomes more and more convinced that he is not only a man, but also a good man. Thus he ends up by accepting him not merely a human being, but also a faithful friend.
1. Huck is a veritable recreation of living models. All the characters had prototypes in real life.
2. The book is written in the colloquial style, in the general standard speech of uneducated Americans. (e.g., ungrammatical element: knowed). Mark Twain’s significant contribution to American literature lies in the fact that he made colloquial speech as accepted, respectable literary medium in the literary history of the country. (About his language characteristics see p190)
3. He made his stance on anti-slavery clear, showed his democratic idea of freedom and equality, as he did in Puddn’ Head Wilson （傻瓜威尔逊）
Life on the Mississippi (在密西西比河上)。 Another masterpiece. The first 20 chapters recall pre-war days of piloting on the river, especially Twain’s experience as a pilot. The last 40 are a rather dry description of the river and the town along it during the early 1880s. He writes about the new commercialism along the river. (In some people’s mind at that time, Dollar is their God; their religion is how to get it). The effect is to contrast the present with the past to communicate the author’s sense of loss.
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (败坏了哈德莱堡的人)：make bitter attack on human race. ( A stranger comes to Hadleyburg and leaves a bag of gold, claiming that this is for one in the town who once helped him. Then those who appeared to be honest all claimed to be the owner of it. It exposes the hypocrisy of human race.
The Mysterious Stranger (神秘的陌生人)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court （在亚瑟王朝廷里的康涅狄格洲美国人）: cuttingly satirized monarchy, feudal caste, and inhumanity.
The Prince and the Pauper （王子与贫儿）Attack upon class distinctions and hereditary advantages.
The Treaty With China（与中国的条约）， To the Person sitting in Darkness （给坐在黑暗中的人）He made attacks on imperialist behavior, stood on the side of China in its struggle against foreign invasions.

Differences between the three realists:
1. In thematic terms, James wrote mostly of the upper reaches of American society, and Howells concerned himself chiefly with middle class life, whereas Mark Twain dealt largely with the lower strata of society.
2. Technically, Howells wrote in the vein (manner, style) of genteel (polite or refined in an affected or exaggerated way) realism, James pursued psychological realism, and Mark Twain’s contribution lies in his theories of localism and his colloquial style.

Chapter 10
American Naturalism

Social background:
1.  After the Civil War, the rapid development of industrialism produced two extremes of wealth and poverty. Slums appeared in great numbers. The city poor lived a life of insecurity, suffering and violence.
2.  Western settlers found themselves subject to the ruthless manipulation of forces (e.g, railroad charged heavy freight rates and drove farmers to bankruptcy).
Now, Howell’s “Happy continent” became odious to this once smiling American, and his realism was now too restrained and genteel in tone to tell the truth of the harsher realities of American life.
Technique of naturalists: They reported truthfully and objectively, got great amounts of data from actual life. They painted life as it was.
Style: bare of imagery, include copious details, ignore literary beauty.
1. It’s a more deliberate kind of realism in novels, stories, and plays, usually involving a view of human being as passive victims of natural forces and environment.
1. They wrote about the helplessness of man, his insignificance in a cold world and his lack of dignity.