Description and Objectives

The Heights School

11th and 12th Grade English

Fall 2025

Instructor: Patrick Miggins, B.A., M. Ed.

Email: pmiggins@heights.edu

Phone: (301)365-0227 (ext. 123)

ENG 324 Mark Twain

Overview:

The Course on Mark Twain will feature his humorous sketches as well as his Mississippi Writings.  Long heralded as the Father of American Literature, we will study Mark Twain’s literary contributions as a fiction writer, humorist, and essayist.  

 

“Mark Twain is perhaps the most widely read and enjoyed of all our national writers.  Tom Sawyer “is simply a hymn,” said its author, “put into prose form to give it a worldly air,” a book where nostalgia is so strong that it dissolves the tensions and perplexities that assert themselves in the later works. Twain began Huckleberry Finn the same year Tom Sawyer was published, but he was unable to complete it for several more. It was during this period of uncertainty that Twain made a pilgrimage to the scenes of his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri, a trip that led eventually to Life on the Mississippi. The river in Twain’s descriptions is a bewitching mixture of beauty and power, seductive calms and treacherous shoals, pleasure and terror, an image of the societies it touches and transports.

 

Through each work, too, runs the Mississippi, the river that T. S. Eliot, echoing Twain, was to call the “strong brown god.” For Twain, the river represented the complex and often contradictory possibilities in his own and his nation’s life. The Mississippi marks the place where civilization, moving west with its comforts and proprieties, discovers and contends with the rough realities, violence, chicaneries, and promise of freedom on the frontier. It is the place, too, where the currents Mark Twain learned to navigate as a pilot—an experience recounted in Life on the Mississippi—move inexorably into the Deep South, so that the innocence of joyful play and boyhood along its shores eventually confronts the grim reality of slavery.” -Guy Cardwell, Library of America editor

Textbooks

“The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”, “About Barbers”, and “The Story of The Bad Little Boy Who Didn’t Come to Grief”, by Mark Twain 

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain

Life on the Mississippi, by Mark Twain

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

Course Requirements

Students should expect daily notes and classroom discussion, daily reading assignments, weekly quizzes and frequent writing assignments of various length, spanning from the reflective essay and poem analysis, to the in-class essay, and then to the traditional typed composition paper.  In addition, once a quarter, students will be required to memorize and to recite a poem, typically a sonnet, for a grade.

There will be a comprehensive mid-semester examination, which will contain the rudiments of genre theory. 

Writing assignments will be completed in class or at home and will typically take place each week.

In-class writing assignments will usually be open-book.

Take-home writing assignments must be typed and cite the text(s) according to MLA format.

Late papers will be accepted, but with a penalty of a letter grade drop for every class period the assignment is late.      

Class participation is required whether it takes the form of effective insights or the asking of probing questions.  At the end of each grading period, class participation will play a role in improving, maintaining, or decreasing the student’s grade for the quarter.

Successful Students

Successful students will respect the subject matter and be dedicated to daily effort both in class and at home.  A good student respects the space this class brings to bear on his sense of honor, knowing that he owes his teacher and his peers thoughtful effort and a mature demeanor, mindful that he will be learning alongside and among his peers and his instructor.

A volunteer representative will serve as a “manager of mirth” to help the instructor schedule gatherings of literary levity, festivity, and refreshment that supersede day-to-day classroom enjoyment.