Literature02 Oct 2007 05:32 pm
Mark Twain is best known as one of America’s greatest novelists. Two of his novels in particular – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – have secured his place in the pantheon of American literature. Remarkable as this is, it understates Twain’s achievement: he was not only a great storyteller; he was also a great journalist.
Twain first rose to prominence with the publication of Innocents Abroad, his account of a trip through Europe and the Middle East. Greater fame came with the publication of his first major stories (beginning with “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”), but Twain never abandoned journalism. In fact, he used his journalistic work to advocate for the cause about which he was most passionate: opposition to imperialism. His most well-known anti-Imperialist tract is King Leopold’s Soliloquy, a satire about the brutal of Belgian policies in the Congo. But Twain wasn’t only critical of imperialists across the Atlantic: he was also very critical when the United States began pursuing similar policies itself.
From 1901 until his death in 1910, Twain was a prominent member of the American Anti-Imperialist League, along with the philosopher John Dewey, industrialist Andrew Carnegie and psychologist William James. Their major cause was opposition to American imperialism in the Philippines, which the United States acquired at the end of the Spanish-American War. He wrote an important work exposing the massacre of 600 Filipinos by the Americans, and never ignored the cause. Thanks in part to Twain and people like him, the Philippines regained its independence in 1933.
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