Edward Short at Literary Review:
In an essay entitled ‘American Literature and Language’ (1953), T S Eliot wrote that, in Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain ‘reveals himself to be one of those writers, of whom there are not a great many in any literature, who have discovered a new way of writing, valid not only for themselves but for others. I should place him, in this respect, even with Dryden and Swift, as one of those rare writers who have brought their language up to date, and in so doing, “purified the dialect of the tribe”.’ One can only imagine the amusement such an encomium would have aroused in Twain, whose plain speaking tended to scandalise the wealthy Protestant tribe with whom he chose to consort. Nevertheless, he certainly had a profound influence on such writers as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, as well as Eliot himself, whose own new way of writing owed a great deal to the creator of Huckleberry Finn.
Had Twain not had the boldness to renew the language, to make it capture the newness of his experience in an America in which newness was fairly exploding, it is questionable whether his successors would have followed suit with quite the confidence they did.
more here.
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