Discuss the local color reflected in Mark Twain’s novels.
(1) Twain is known as a local colorist, who preferred to present social life through portraits of the local characters of his regions, including people living in that area, the landscape, and other peculiarities like the customs, dialects, costumes and so on. Consequently, the rich material of his boyhood experience on the Mississippi became the endless resources for his fiction, and the Mississippi valley and the west became his major theme. Unlike James and Howells, Mark Twain wrote about the lower-class people, because they were the people he knew so well and their life was the one he had lived. Moreover, he successfully used local color and historical settings to illustrate and shed light on the contemporary society. (2) His words are colloquial, concrete and direct in effect, and his sentences structures are simple, even ungrammatical, which is typical of the spoken language. And Twain skillfully used the colloquialism to cast his protagonists in their everyday life. What's more, his characters, confined to a particular region and to a particular historical moment, speak with a strong accent, which is true of his local colorism.
