Sam Clemens of Hannibal

Sam Clemens of Hannibal PDF Author: Dixon Wecter
Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin
ISBN:
Category : Authors, American
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
This is the first definitive biography of the real Tom Sawyer--the fun-loving practical joker whose youth in a Mississippi River town typifies the Golden Age of American Boyhood. No major writer ever made more of his boyhood than did Samuel Clemens whose growing up has become a part of our common heritage.

Sam Clemens of Hannibal

Sam Clemens of Hannibal PDF Author: Dixon Wecter
Publisher: Boston : Houghton Mifflin
ISBN:
Category : Authors, American
Languages : en
Pages : 362

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Book Description
This is the first definitive biography of the real Tom Sawyer--the fun-loving practical joker whose youth in a Mississippi River town typifies the Golden Age of American Boyhood. No major writer ever made more of his boyhood than did Samuel Clemens whose growing up has become a part of our common heritage.

Samuel Clemens of Hannibal

Samuel Clemens of Hannibal PDF Author: Anne E. Miller
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 20

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Book Description


Sam Clemens, of Hannibal, by Dixon Wecter

Sam Clemens, of Hannibal, by Dixon Wecter PDF Author: Dixon Wecter
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description


The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn PDF Author: Mark Twain
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (often shortened to Huck Finn) is a novel written by American humorist Mark Twain. It is commonly used and accounted as one of the first Great American Novels. It is also one of the first major American novels written using Local Color Regionalism, or vernacular, told in the first person by the eponymous Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, best friend of Tom Sawyer and hero of three other Mark Twain books.The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. By satirizing Southern antebellum society that was already a quarter-century in the past by the time of publication, the book is an often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism. The drifting journey of Huck and his friend Jim, a runaway slave, down the Mississippi River on their raft may be one of the most enduring images of escape and freedom in all of American literature.

Searching for Jim

Searching for Jim PDF Author: Terrell Dempsey
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826215939
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Searching for Jim is the untold story of Sam Clemens and the world of slavery that produced him. Despite Clemens’s remarks to the contrary in his autobiography, slavery was very much a part of his life. Dempsey has uncovered a wealth of newspaper accounts and archival material revealing that Clemens’s life, from the ages of twelve to seventeen, was intertwined with the lives of the slaves around him. During Sam’s earliest years, his father, John Marshall Clemens, had significant interaction with slaves. Newly discovered court records show the senior Clemens in his role as justice of the peace in Hannibal enforcing the slave ordinances. With the death of his father, young Sam was apprenticed to learn the printing and newspaper trade. It was in the newspaper that slaves were bought and sold, masters sought runaways, and life insurance was sold on slaves. Stories the young apprentice typeset helped Clemens learn to write in black dialect, a skill he would use throughout his writing, most notably in Huckleberry Finn. Missourians at that time feared abolitionists across the border in Illinois and Iowa. Slave owners suspected every traveling salesman, itinerant preacher, or immigrant of being an abolition agent sent to steal slaves. This was the world in which Sam Clemens grew up. Dempsey also discusses the stories of Hannibal’s slaves: their treatment, condition, and escapes. He uncovers new information about the Underground Railroad, particularly about the role free blacks played in northeast Missouri. Carefully reconstructed from letters, newspaper articles, sermons, speeches, books, and court records, Searching for Jim offers a new perspective on Clemens’s writings, especially regarding his use of race in the portrayal of individual characters, their attitudes, and worldviews. This fascinating volume will be valuable to anyone trying to measure the extent to which Clemens transcended the slave culture he lived in during his formative years and the struggles he later faced in dealing with race and guilt. It will forever alter the way we view Sam Clemens, Hannibal, and Mark Twain.

Mark T-W-A-I-N!

Mark T-W-A-I-N! PDF Author: David R. Collins
Publisher: Millbrook Press
ISBN: 0822589109
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 68

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Book Description
Samuel Clemens grew up in a child's paradise--Hannibal, Missouri. There, mischief added humor to everyday events as Sam encountered the folks who would one day reappear as Huck Finn, Aunt Polly, and Becky Thatcher in his books, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. At eighteen, Sam left Hannibal to seek his fortune. He became a newspaperman and story writer. Then, always a restless spirit, he tried his hand as a steamboat pilot (where he took a liking to the riverboat call "mark twain"), a soldier, and a gold prospector. All the while, Sam collected tales to tell on stage and recount in his many books. David Collins invites readers into the fabulously exciting, endlessly entertaining world of "America's Greatest Humorist"--the beloved Mark Twain.

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


Dangerous Water

Dangerous Water PDF Author: Ron Powers
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0306820315
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Book Description
While Mark Twain remains one of our most quintessentially American writers, the actual boyhood experiences that fueled his most enduring literature remained largely unexplored—until now. Twain's early years were a decidedly un-innocent time, marked by deaths of friends and family and his father's bankruptcy. Twain dealt with those personal tragedies through humor and the tall tale. From the time that a ten-year-old Samuel Clemens lit out on his own and boarded his first Mississippi steamer to his first encounter with a traveling "mesmerizer" (which ignited his lifelong penchant for acting and spectacle), from the brooding sense of guilt and fear of eternal damnation inculcated into him at church to the superstitions and stories of witchcraft he learned from the blacks on his farm, Powers unforgettably shows how Mark Twain was shaped by the distinctly American landscape, culture, and people of Hannibal, Missouri. Jay Parini, the celebrated biographer of Robert Frost, called Dangerous Water "a long-needed evocation of the boyhood of the man who invented boyhood for all time. . . . An immensely shrewd and deeply engaging book, a great gift to all of us who love Twain."

American Boy

American Boy PDF Author: Don Brown
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547349858
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 32

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Book Description
Our popular image of Mark Twain is of a gruff, gray-haired eccentric, the outspoken literary giant who created enduring novels such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But once upon a time, Mark Twain was a boy named Samuel Clemens. His birth on November 30, 1835, coincided with the appearance of Halley’s comet, streaking across the sky. A dreamer, a prankster, a lover of great tales, Sam Clemens spent his boyhood years living out adventures on the banks of the mighty Mississippi River.

Mark Twain's Hannibal, Huck, and Tom

Mark Twain's Hannibal, Huck, and Tom PDF Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520375718
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 512

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Book Description
This volume provides authoritative texts of Twain’s unpublished writings, both fictional and factual, about the people and places of his home town, Hannibal, Missouri. A significant part of only one of them, "Jane Lampton Clemens," has been published; it was inserted unjustifiably in Twain's Authobiography . Written soon after the death of Clemens's mother on 27October 1890, it arranges and assesses a son's recollections of a vibrant personality important in shaping his life. At the start the author turns to the time when he, a six-year-old, knelt with his mother by the bed on which his dead brother lay—a harassing experience that understandably seared the boy's memory. The sketch moves on to a host of details about antebellum Hannibal, its society and its attitudes toward slavery, and to vivid memories about the child, his mother, and his father in the 1840's and 1850's. The movement from a single remembered episode to a series of loosely associated recollections was a typical performance in Clemens's "autobiography" and his fiction.