WeekThreeENGL102contrubite
English 102
7 December 2014
A Critical Evaluation of Mark Twain’s “The Damned Human Race” Mark Twain who is unquestionably one of Americas top renowned literary figures was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835. Twain wrote the short essay “The Damned Human Race” around the turn of the 20th century and had it published in one of his last works an anthology titled “Letters from the Earth” (Twain). Experts attribute Twain’s heavy use of satire and irony in this essay to the dark period in his life; he experienced the death of both his wife and daughter, and he was financially unstable. Twain set out to disapprove the current Darwinian Theory that the human race evolved from lower life forms. Unsuccessfully, Mark Twain presented his theory that man descended from the higher animals with the questionable use of logical research, and although emotionally unpleasant, he provided examples of human wastefulness that boarder on fiction in “The Dammed Human Race” and thus failed to prove the degradation of the human race.
Twain although a creditable writer and a prominent figure in American literature is best known for his works in fiction such as “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, “Life on the Mississippi”, and “The Prince and the Pauper”. For being the talented writer that Twain is he does lack any creditability in the fields of biology, genealogy, and zoology, all of which he presents claims of research data in the essay. He claims to have concluded the data by not “guessed”, “speculated”, or “conjectured”, but by “scientific method” (Twain) but fails to list details of when and who actual performed the experiments. The numerous amounts of satire and sarcasm is not the method used in scholarly essays, and therefor discredits the research data. Twain does state the London Zoological Gardens provided the location of the experiments, and covered many months of painstaking and fatiguing work (Twain). Early in the essay, he talks about an
7 December 2014
A Critical Evaluation of Mark Twain’s “The Damned Human Race” Mark Twain who is unquestionably one of Americas top renowned literary figures was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835. Twain wrote the short essay “The Damned Human Race” around the turn of the 20th century and had it published in one of his last works an anthology titled “Letters from the Earth” (Twain). Experts attribute Twain’s heavy use of satire and irony in this essay to the dark period in his life; he experienced the death of both his wife and daughter, and he was financially unstable. Twain set out to disapprove the current Darwinian Theory that the human race evolved from lower life forms. Unsuccessfully, Mark Twain presented his theory that man descended from the higher animals with the questionable use of logical research, and although emotionally unpleasant, he provided examples of human wastefulness that boarder on fiction in “The Dammed Human Race” and thus failed to prove the degradation of the human race.
Twain although a creditable writer and a prominent figure in American literature is best known for his works in fiction such as “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, “Life on the Mississippi”, and “The Prince and the Pauper”. For being the talented writer that Twain is he does lack any creditability in the fields of biology, genealogy, and zoology, all of which he presents claims of research data in the essay. He claims to have concluded the data by not “guessed”, “speculated”, or “conjectured”, but by “scientific method” (Twain) but fails to list details of when and who actual performed the experiments. The numerous amounts of satire and sarcasm is not the method used in scholarly essays, and therefor discredits the research data. Twain does state the London Zoological Gardens provided the location of the experiments, and covered many months of painstaking and fatiguing work (Twain). Early in the essay, he talks about an
Cited: Twain, Mark. “The Damned Human Race.” Moodyap.pbworks.com. n.d. Web. 12 Nov 2014.