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 Autobiography

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

Get Book Here

Book Description


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.

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.”

Mark Twain And The South

Mark Twain And The South PDF Author: Arthur G. Pettit
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813148782
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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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.

Inventing Mark Twain

Inventing Mark Twain PDF Author: Andrew Jay Hoffman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780753804582
Category : Authors, American
Languages : en
Pages : 572

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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.

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.

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."

The Adventures of Mark Twain by Huckleberry Finn

The Adventures of Mark Twain by Huckleberry Finn PDF Author: Robert Burleigh
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1481428403
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 48

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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.

The Life of Mark Twain

The Life of Mark Twain PDF Author: Gary Scharnhorst
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826274005
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 719

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Book Description
This book begins the first multi-volume biography of Samuel Clemens to appear in over a century. In the succeeding years, Clemens biographers have either tailored their narratives to fit the parameters of a single volume or focused on a particular period or aspect of Clemens’s life, because the whole of that epic life cannot be compressed into a single volume. In The Life of Mark Twain, Gary Scharnhorst has chosen to write a complete biography plotted from beginning to end, from a single point of view, on an expansive canvas. With dozens of Mark Twain biographies available, what is left unsaid? On average, a hundred Clemens letters and a couple of Clemens interviews surface every year. Scharnhorst has located documents relevant to Clemens’s life in Missouri, along the Mississippi River, and in the West, including some which have been presumed lost. Over three volumes, Scharnhorst elucidates the life of arguably the greatest American writer and reveals the alchemy of his gifted imagination.

Who Was Mark Twain?

Who Was Mark Twain? PDF Author: April Jones Prince
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0448433192
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 113

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Book Description
A humorist, narrator, and social observer, Mark Twain is unsurpassed in American literature. Best known as the author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, not unlike his protagonist, Huck, has a restless spirit. He found adventure prospecting for silver in Nevada, navigating steamboats down the Mississippi, and making people laugh around the world. But Twain also had a serious streak and decried racism and injustice. His fascinating life is captured candidly in this enjoyable biography.