Mrs. Mark Twain

Mrs. Mark Twain PDF Author: Martin Naparsteck
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476613095
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
This is the first book-length biography of Olivia Langdon Clemens, Mark Twain's wife. Livy was an intelligent, well-educated woman of Victorian values and sensibilities who lived a charmed and tragic life. Raised in the wealthiest family in Elmira, New York, she married the man destined to become the best known American in the world. She befriended the literary elite of America and Europe, traveled the globe, dined with royalty. Yet her life was filled with tragedy. Her son was born prematurely and died at 19 months. Her oldest daughter died of spinal meningitis at 24. Her youngest daughter was an epileptic. Her husband's bad investments drove the family into bankruptcy. Her frail health kept her bedridden for years at a time. Yet through all this, she and her husband shared a family life filled with love and tenderness.

Mrs. Mark Twain

Mrs. Mark Twain PDF Author: Martin Naparsteck
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476613095
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the first book-length biography of Olivia Langdon Clemens, Mark Twain's wife. Livy was an intelligent, well-educated woman of Victorian values and sensibilities who lived a charmed and tragic life. Raised in the wealthiest family in Elmira, New York, she married the man destined to become the best known American in the world. She befriended the literary elite of America and Europe, traveled the globe, dined with royalty. Yet her life was filled with tragedy. Her son was born prematurely and died at 19 months. Her oldest daughter died of spinal meningitis at 24. Her youngest daughter was an epileptic. Her husband's bad investments drove the family into bankruptcy. Her frail health kept her bedridden for years at a time. Yet through all this, she and her husband shared a family life filled with love and tenderness.

Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain

Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain PDF Author: Justin Kaplan
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439129312
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 679

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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 Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain

The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain PDF Author: Susan K. Harris
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521553841
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
Passionate readers both, Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain courted through books, spelling out their expectations through literary references as they corresponded during their frequent separations. Working with Langdon's own letters and diaries as well as Twain's, Harris traces the progress of their courtship within the larger context of Victorian American culture, showing how the couple negotiated their relationship through the mediums of literature, material culture, and social and familial dynamics.

Mark and Livy

Mark and Livy PDF Author: Resa Willis
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113593682X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Olivia Langdon Clemens was not only the love of Mark Twain's life and the mother of his children, she was also his editor, muse, critic and trusted advisor. She read his letters and speeches. He relied on her judgment on his writing, and readily admitted that she not only edited his work, but also edited his public persona.Until now, little has been known about Livy's crucial place in Twain's life. In Resa Willis's affecting and fascinating biography, we meet a dignified, optimistic women who married young, raised three sons and a daughter, endured myriad health problems and money woes and who faithfully traipsed all over the world with Twain--Africa, Europe, Asia--while battling his moodiness and her frailty.Twain adored her. A hard-drinking dreamer with an insatiable wanderlust, he needed someone to tame him. It was Livy who encouraged him to finish his autobiography even through the last stages of her illness. When she died in 1904, Twain's zest for life and writing was gone. He died six years later. A triumph of the biographer's art, Mark and Livy presents the fullest picture yet of one of the most influential women in American letters.

Mark and Livy

Mark and Livy PDF Author: Resa Willis
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 0203503090
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Olivia Langdon Clemens was not only the love of Mark Twain's life and the mother of his children, she was also his editor, muse, critic and trusted advisor. She read his letters and speeches. He relied on her judgment on his writing, and readily admitted that she not only edited his work, but also edited his public persona. Until now, little has been known about Livy's crucial place in Twain's life. In Resa Willis's affecting and fascinating biography, we meet a dignified, optimistic woman who married young, raised three sons and a daughter, endured myriad health problems and money woes and who faithfully traipsed all over the world with Twain - Africa, Europe, Asia-while battling his moodiness and her frailty. Twain adored her. A hard-drinking dreamer with an insatiable wanderlust, he needed someone to tame him. It was Livy who encouraged him to finish his autobiography even through the last stages of her illness. When she died in 1904, Twain's zest for life and writing was gone. He died six years later. A triumph of the biographer's art, Mark and Livy presents the fullest picture yet of one of the most influential women in American letters.

Twain's End

Twain's End PDF Author: Lynn Cullen
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476758972
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
"In March of 1909, Mark Twain cheerfully blessed the wedding of his private secretary, Isabel V. Lyon, and his business manager, Ralph Ashcroft. One month later, he fired both, wrote a ferocious 429-page rant about the pair, and then --with his daughter, Clara Clemens--slandered Isabel in the newspapers, erasing her nearly seven years of devoted service to their family."--Page 4 of cover

Mark Twain

Mark Twain PDF Author: Ron Powers
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1847395996
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 1176

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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.

Mrs. Mark Twain

Mrs. Mark Twain PDF Author: Martin Naparsteck
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786472618
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
This is the first book-length biography of Olivia Langdon Clemens, Mark Twain's wife. Livy was an intelligent, well-educated woman of Victorian values and sensibilities who lived a charmed and tragic life. Raised in the wealthiest family in Elmira, New York, she married the man destined to become the best known American in the world. She befriended the literary elite of America and Europe, traveled the globe, dined with royalty. Yet her life was filled with tragedy. Her son was born prematurely and died at 19 months. Her oldest daughter died of spinal meningitis at 24. Her youngest daughter was an epileptic. Her husband's bad investments drove the family into bankruptcy. Her frail health kept her bedridden for years at a time. Yet through all this, she and her husband shared a family life filled with love and tenderness.

Mark Twain's Autobiography

Mark Twain's Autobiography PDF Author: Mark Twain
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 398

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Book Description


Mark Twain's Other Woman

Mark Twain's Other Woman PDF Author: Laura Skandera Trombley
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307474941
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Laura Skandera Trombley, the preeminent Twain scholar at work today, reveals the never-before-read letters and daily journals of Isabel Lyon, Mark Twain’s last personal secretary. For six years, Isabel Lyon was responsible for running the aging Man in White’s chaotic household, nursing him through several illnesses and serving as his adoring audience. But after a dramatic breakup of their relationship, Twain ranted in personal letters that she was “a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, a drunkard, a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator, a filthy-minded and salacious slut pining for seduction.” For decades, biographers omitted Isabel from the official Twain history at his decree. But now, the truth of the split is exposed at last in a story that sheds light on a lionized author’s final decade.