Literary Masterpieces Series 6, One of

Author: Mark Twain
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-07-01
Features: This is a graded reading series of world literary classics published for students of English as a foreign language. The series is closely aligned with the requirements of the new English Curriculum Standards, divided into 8 levels based on difficulty, catering to the reading needs of students at all stages and helping them achieve the cultivation goals of the new curriculum standards in terms of language skills, language knowledge, learning strategies, and cultural awareness. The series has the following main features:
- It includes classic Western literary works, helping students improve their language level while allowing them to get a glimpse of the full picture of literary masterpieces through reading abridged versions suitable for their foreign language proficiency.
- According to the new curriculum standards, the vocabulary ranges from 150 to 3,500 words, meeting the reading needs of primary and secondary school students.
- The language difficulty progresses gradually, assisting teachers in expanding students' language knowledge and cultural background information, and enhancing their English reading skills.
- Levels 1 to 5 include one exercise per page, with a large volume of practice and a rich variety of test formats, which is beneficial for students and teachers to assess and evaluate reading abilities and levels in a quantifiable way, serving as an excellent supplement to classroom teaching.
- The language is simple, vivid, and authentic, published with English annotations, preserving the original flavor of English while bilingual annotations (Chinese-English) remove language barriers for readers, fully engaging their reading interest and making English reading easier.
Mark Twain (1835–1910) was born in Florida on the banks of the Mississippi River and was originally named Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Before becoming a writer, he worked as a typesetter, a Mississippi River pilot, a miner, and a journalist. As a journalist, he traveled extensively, visiting the East Coast of the United States, the Mediterranean, and the Near East. Twain deeply sympathized with wanderers and those oppressed by society. He possessed a genius for satire and had a keen, detached perspective on the hypocrisy of the world. Many of his outstanding works reflect, to some extent, his own background and experiences: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1884), and the undisputed masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), among others. After experiencing the loss of a daughter and a financial crisis, some of Twain's later works offered sharp satire on human society and fate, including The Prince and the Pauper (1894), Joan of Arc (1896), The Gilded Age (1890), and The Mysterious Stranger (1916), among others. Twain pioneered a new style of prose and made an indelible contribution to American literature.