Name ______________________________ Period _______
Date ________
Viewing Guide for Mark Twain, a film by Ken Burns
Directions: Respond to the questions as you view the film.
Introduction
(Note that the names Sam Clemens and Mark Twain are used
interchangeably.)
1. According to Twain, why did God invent man?
He was disappointed in the monkey
2. What sort of jobs did Twain have throughout his life?
Comedian, businessman, writer
Important Idea: If America was going to be the country people wanted it to be, then the
problem of race needed to be resolved.
3. When and where was Twain born?
November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri
4. What was Twain’s birth name?
Samuel Clemens
5. What event took place in the evening sky on the night of Twain’s birth?
Halley’s comet
6. Clemens said he never saw his father ______laugh__________.
7. Clemens’s mother delighted in hearing and telling _____tall tales_________________.
8. Clemens’s family moved to Hannibal__________, and this is where he gathered the stories
for his future tales. Twain describes this place as an “Eden, an eternal summer.”
9. Sam’s best friend was _Tom, son of the town drunkard.
10. Who were Uncle Dan’l and Aunt Hannah? Why were they important?
They were he uncle’s slaves who introduced him to spirituals and jubilees. They were the
first voices of his childhood. They were metaphorical story-tellers.
11. Why did Sam drop out of school? His father died, and he needed to work to hel support
the family.
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12. What was Sam’s first job? He worked for a newspaper as a printer’s apprentice.
13. At age 17, Sam set off down the river. It was the beginning of a lifetime of wandering.
What two things did he promise his mother he would not do? Drink and gamble
14. What did Sam decide he wanted to do once he got on the steamship Paul Jones?
-- go to Brazil to trade in cocoa plants.
Safe Water
15. Clemens became an apprentice to the captain of the Paul Jones.
16. Where did Clemens get his final pen name, Mark Twain? What does “Mark Twain” mean?
Mark Twain is a water measurement that means “twelve feet; safe water”
17. In 1858 Clemens became a cub pilot and his brother Henry joined him as a clerk on the
steamboat Pennsylvania. What happened and whom did Sam blame? Henry and Sam
took different steamboats to visit their sister. Henry’s steamboat exploded, and Henry was
badly burned. He eventually died of his injuries. Clemens blamed himself for bringing
Henry on the riverboat.
18. In 1859, Clemens became a riverboat pilot for $250____ dollars a month.
19. What did Clemens think about being a pilot? He felt that a pilot was the only truly
independent person. He was an absolute monarch.
20. Clemens said his time on the river was his __schooling_. He was a prodigious “noticer.” He
noticed everything.
21. Why did Clemens stop being a riverboat pilot? Commercial traffic on the Mississippi River
stopped when the Civil War began.
Old Voices
22. During the summertime the Clemens would travel to Livy’s sister’s home, Quarry Farm.
They did this for 20 years. Who did Sam make friends with there?
Clemens made friends with John T. Lewis, a free African-American pig farmer from
Maryland.
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Name ______________________________ Period _______
Date ________
23. Mary Ann Cord was the cook at Quarry Farm. She was African American. She told her life
story to the Clemens family, and Twain was so moved by it that he wrote it down,
renaming Mary Ann as Aunt Rachel, as a piece he titled “A True Story as I Heard It,” which
was published in The Atlantic Monthly. What were the “troubles” that Mary Ann/Aunt
Rachel had lived through? Mary Ann was separated from her family when her husband
and seven children were sold away from her.
24. What was Twain’s method of composition? Twain would write in isolation, on the top of a
hill overlooking a valley. He would write during the day and share his stories with his family
in the evenings.
25. Summers at Quarry Farm were where Twain wrote about his past and created the
characters of __Tom Sawyer____, Becky Thatcher, and _Huckleberry Finn___.
26. Twain wrote seemingly simple sentences with characters that are seemingly simple, and
this made the reader trust what was written. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is the best
loved of all Twain’s books. It’s the Norman Rockwell version of what we’d like to think
boyhood_ is.
27. In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, one of the most famous passages is about how Tom
tricks another boy into white-washing the fence.
All Right Then, I’ll Go to Hell
28. “The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference
between lightning ___ and a _____lightning bug______________________.”
29. After Twain had written about 400 pages of Huck Finn he still wasn’t sure he liked it and
often put it aside over the next seven years. Huck Finn started as a sequel to _______Tom
Sawyer_, but became something different because of the Emancipation Proclamation
and then the end of Reconstruction.
30. In 1882, after a steamboat trip on the Mississippi River, Twain started on Huck Finn again.
What is it believed that Twain was looking at while on that steamboat trip? What did he
see? He saw the horrible failure of freeing the slaves.
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31.
Huck Finn would be Twain’s masterpiece_.
32. Twain probably didn’t realize how revolutionary Huck Finn was at the time he was writing
it. However, he cut American literature loose with Huck Finn. What did Hemingway say
about the book? It was the beginning of American lit.
33. Huck Finn is written completely in dialect and from a Southerner’s perspective that
changes. How does Twain treat the subject of slavery in Huck Finn?
He demystifies it and takes the romanticism away
34. Huck Finn was first banned by the _________Concord, MA library_________________
because of the ___________coarse language_______________________. Other eras’ own
demons have caused continual banning of this novel.
Introduction to Part II
35. By 50 years of age, Mark Twain was known as the best known writer __on_____
__Earth_____________.
36. Huckleberry Finn was the first book that took an American dialect and made it
___great_________
_____litearture______.
37. Who did Mark Twain meet at Yale? What role does this man play in history?
Warner T. McGuinn, the first African-American graduate of Yale Law. McGuinn became was
a mentor to Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Supreme Court Judge.
38. A Mark Twain scholar says that Twain’s work changed the world ___at_________
_____the_________
____edges________.
The American
39. “I am not ____an______ American, I am ____the_________ American.” - Mark Twain
40. Halley’s Comet was coming again in 1910. “It will be the greatest disappointment of my
life if I _____don’t_________ go ______out___________ with it.” – Mark Twain
41. His friend said that Twain was the ______Lincoln_________________ of our Literature.
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Name ______________________________ Period _______
Date ________
42. Twain’s literature teaches us what it is to be _________human____________________.
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