San Francisco, California has experienced fourteen earthquakes above a magnitude above 5.1 since 1836. The earthquakes of 1865 and 1906 both brought on varying forms of destruction. Twain, writing about the earthquake of 1865, found amusement and humor in the devastating event; while London only saw the destruction and loss in the earthquake of 1906.
To inform and to entertain are, respectively, Jack London’s and Mark Twain’s purposes in writing about the two different earthquakes that struck San Francisco. Both writers experienced the earthquakes’ destruction first-hand, but had very different interpretations of it. Where London saw devastation, Twain saw only a massive force that moved the ground beneath his feet. And where Twain saw humor, London saw large sums of dollars shaken and burned to the ground. To emphasize and prove their points, the authors use different levels and forms of rhetorical devices and language. Only seeing loss in the natural disaster, London uses short sentences
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London continues to develop the idea of devastation by using little imagery and rather uses facts and more concrete details. The little imagery that he does use, such as describing the sky as “darkening” and the land as “filling with smoke,” creates an idea of darkness destruction. This and the fact that he writes chronologically furthers his interpretation of the earthquake as nothing other than a horrific event that only resulted in the fire that destroyed the entire city. Twain had only a slightly different understanding of the earthquake he witnessed. Twain’s piece is full of lengthy sentences filled with imagery. The imagery he uses in sentences such as when he describes the man getting stuck in the doorway and the houses “vomiting a stream of human beings,” shows that while the earthquake may have been scary at the time, but Twain was able to find the humor in the