The Damned Human Race Mark Twain Analysis

Mark Twain is a very famous writer in American Literature, he has written some very influential pieces some of which include, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi River and The Prince and the Pauper. Twain’s actual name is, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, but he wrote as Mark Twain. Growing up near the Mississippi River had a lot of influence on Twain’s writings. Twain first writing career started at a local newspaper in California. At the age of sixty- four he wrote his first novel, The Innocents Abroad. Towards the end of his career he lost his wife and daughter he became very bitter which ended up having a major effect in his later writings.
Summary
“For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of …show more content…
In “The Damned Human Race” Twain starts off by telling the reader that he has been studying the traits of animals and contrasting them to the traits of humans. He has been basing his study off of the Darwin theory, that humans evolved from a lower animal species. Twain poses his first example of how a human is worse than an Anaconda. He tells the story of a group of hunters that shot seventy- two buffalo for entertainment, but were going to eat the buffalo as well. The hunters ended up only eating half of a buffalo and let the others go to waste. Twain then did an experiment to show that an anaconda, in a cage full of cows, will only eat one cow and will then sit back in his cage and not disturb the others until he is hungry again. This shows that man is more cruel than an Anaconda. Next Twain uses the example to contrast man that has millions between an insect gathering for the winter. A bee or ant will only take what they need for the winter, whereas a man who has millions of dollars, will cheat the system just to make more money. Although the man has millions he still thinks he