Author: Mark TwainPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 398
Book Description
Mark Twain's Autobiography
Author: Mark TwainMark Twain and the South
Author: Arthur G. PettitPublisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 9780813191409
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Book Description
The South was many things to Mark Twain: boyhood home, testing ground for manhood, and the principal source of creative inspiration. Although he left the South while a young man, seldom to return, it remained for him always a haunting presence, alternately loved and loathed. Mark Twain and the South was the first book on this major yet largely ignored aspect of the private life of Samuel Clemens and one of the major themes in his writing from 1863 until his death. Arthur G. Pettit clearly demonstrates that Mark Twain's feelings on race and region moved in an intelligible direction from the white Southern point of view he was exposed to in his youth to self-censorship, disillusionment, and, ultimately, a deeply pessimistic and sardonic outlook in which the dream of racial brotherhood was forever dead. Approaching his subject as a historian with a deep appreciation for literature, he bases his study on a wide variety of Mark Twain's published and unpublished works, including his notebooks, scrapbooks, and letters. An interesting feature of this illuminating work is an examination of Clemens's relations with the only two black men he knew well in his adult years.
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain
Author: Justin KaplanPublisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439129312
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 679
Book Description
Mark Twain, the American comic genius who portrayed, named, and in part exemplified America’s “Gilded Age,” comes alive in Justin Kaplan’s extraordinary biography. With brilliant immediacy, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain brings to life a towering literary figure whose dual persona symbolized the emerging American conflict between down-to-earth morality and freewheeling ambition. As Mark Twain, he was the Mississippi riverboat pilot, the satirist with a fiery hatred of pretension, and the author of such classics as Tom Sawyer andHuckleberry Finn. As Mr. Clemens, he was the star who married an heiress, built a palatial estate, threw away fortunes on harebrained financial schemes, and lived the extravagant life that Mark Twain despised. Kaplan effectively portrays the triumphant-tragic man whose achievements and failures, laughter and anger, reflect a crucial generation in our past as well as his own dark, divided, and remarkably contemporary spirit. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain brilliantly conveys this towering literary figure who was himself a symbol of the peculiarly American conflict between moral scrutiny and the drive to succeed. Mr. Clemens lived the Gilded Life that Mark Twain despised. The merging and fragmenting of these and other identities, as the biography unfolds, results in a magnificent projection of the whole man; the great comic spirit; and the exuberant, tragic human being, who, his friend William Dean Howells said, was “sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.”
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Author: Mark TwainPublisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 9788174760159
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Book Description
In Its Distrust Of Too Much Civilisation And Its Concern With The Way Language Turns Dreamy And Corrupt When Divorced From The Real Condition Of Life, Huckleberry Finn Echoed Some Of The Central Concerns Of Life Today. Like All Great Works Of Fiction Where No Story Is Told As If It Is The Only One, Huck Finn Is Open-Ended, The 'Unfinished Story' Where The True Meaning Is Left To The Conscience And Imagination Of Each Reader.
Inventing Mark Twain
Author: Andrew Jay HoffmanPublisher:
ISBN: 9780753804582
Category : Authors, American
Languages : en
Pages : 572
Book Description
This provocative, definitive biography explores the revealing and resonant contradictions between the true character of Samuel Clemens and his self-created alter ego, Mark Twain. Richly detailed and filled with new information from primary sources, Inventing Mark Twain traces an extraordinary life that led from Mississippi steamboats to the California goldfields to cultural immortality as America's national philosopher.
River of Dreams
Author: Thomas Ruys SmithPublisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807143081
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 258
Book Description
Even in the decades before Mark Twain enthralled the world with his evocative representations of the Mississippi, the river played an essential role in American culture and consciousness. Throughout the antebellum era, the Mississippi acted as a powerful symbol of America's conception of itself -- and the world's conception of America. As Twain understood, "The Mississippi is well worth reading about." Thomas Ruys Smith's River of Dreams is an examination of the Mississippi's role in the antebellum imagination, exploring its cultural position in literature, art, thought, and national life. Presidents, politicians, authors, poets, painters, and international celebrities of every variety experienced the Mississippi in its Golden Age. They left an extraordinary collection of representations of the river in their wake, images that evolved as America itself changed. From Thomas Jefferson's vision for the Mississippi to Andrew Jackson and the rowdy river culture of the early nineteenth century, Smith charts the Mississippi's shifting importance in the making of the nation. He examines the accounts of European travelers, including Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray, whose views of the river were heavily influenced by the world of the steamboat and plantation slavery. Smith discusses the growing importance of visual representations of the Mississippi as the antebellum period progressed, exploring the ways in which views of the river, particularly giant moving panoramas that toured the world, echoed notions of manifest destiny and the westward movement. He evokes the river in the late antebellum years as a place of crime and mystery, especially in popular writing, and most notably in Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man. An epilogue discusses the Mississippi during the Civil War, when possession of the river became vital, symbolically as well as militarily. The epilogue also provides an introduction to Mark Twain, a product of the antebellum river world who was to resurrect its imaginative potential for a post-war nation and produce an iconic Mississippi that still flows through a wide and fertile floodplain in American literature. From empire building in the Louisiana Purchase to the trauma of the Civil War, the Mississippi's dominant symbolic meanings tracked the essential forces operating within the nation. As Smith shows in this groundbreaking work, the story of the imagined Mississippi River is the story of antebellum America itself.
The Adventures of Mark Twain by Huckleberry Finn
Author: Robert BurleighPublisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1481428403
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 48
Book Description
Everyone knows the story of the raft on the Mississippi and that ol' whitewashed fence, but now it’s time for youngins everywhere to get right acquainted with the man behind the pen. Mr. Mark Twain! An interesting character, he was...even if he did sometimes get all gussied up in linen suits and even if he did make it rich and live in a house with so many tiers and gazebos that it looked like a weddin’ cake. All that’s a little too proper and hog tied for our narrator, Huckleberry Finn, but no one is more right for the job of telling this picture book biography than Huck himself. (We’re so glad he would oblige.) And, he’ll tell you one thing—that Mr. Twain was a piece a work! Famous for his sense of humor and saying exactly what’s on his mind, a real satirist he was—perhaps America’s greatest. Ever. True to Huck’s voice, this picture book biography is a river boat ride into the life of a real American treasure.
Mark Twain
Author: Ron PowersPublisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1847395996
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1176
Book Description
Twain's story is epic, comic and tragic. To retrace it all in illuminating detail, Powers draws on the tens of thousands of Twain's letters and on his astonishing journal entries - many of which are quoted here for the first time. Twain left Missouri for a life on the Mississippi during the golden age of steamboats, enjoyed an uproariously drunken newspaper career in the Nevada of the Wild West, and witnessed and joined the extremes of wealth and poverty of New York City and of the Gilded Age. Through it all he observed, borrowed, stole and combined the characters he met into the voice of America's greatest literature, attracting throngs of fans wherever his undying lust for wandering took him. From Twain's wicked satire to his relationships with the likes of Ulysses Grant, this is a brilliantly written story that astounds, amuses and edifies as only a great life can.
Mark My Words
Author: Mark TwainPublisher: St Martins Press
ISBN: 9780312143657
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 160
Book Description
Provides a personal look at the man behind the writing through an amusing collection of his expressed opinions and thoughts on such topics as such as fellow writers, authors, editors, children's books, humor, and public speakers.
Mark Twain's Book for Bad Boys and Girls
Author: Mark TwainPublisher: M J F Books
ISBN: 9781567315318
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 196
Book Description
This is the first-ever compilation of Twain's wise and witty essays, sketches, and stories on the joys and rewards of misbehavior. With themes including "honesty is not always the best policy, ""the wicked are not always punished," and "virtue is often its only reward," this is a charming treasury that will warm the hearts of bad boys and girls (of any age)everywhere