Download or read book Mark Twain and Youth written by Kevin Mac Donnell and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-07-28 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the greatest American authors, Mark Twain holds a special position not only as a distinctly American cultural icon but also as a preeminent portrayer of youth. His famous writings about children and youthful themes are central to both his work and his popularity. The distinguished contributors to Mark Twain and Youth make Twain even more accessible to modern readers by fully exploring youth themes in both his life and his extensive writings. The volume's twenty-six original essays offer new perspectives on such important subjects as Twain's boyhood; his relationships with his siblings and his own children; his attitudes toward aging, gender roles, and slavery; the marketing, reception, teaching, and adaptation of his works; and youth themes in his individual novels--Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, Pudd'nhead Wilson, and Joan of Arc. The book also includes a revealing foreword by actor Hal Holbrook, who has performed longer as “Mark Twain” than Samuel Clemens himself did. The book includes contributions by: Lawrence Berkove, John Bird, Jocelyn A. Chadwick, Joseph Csicsila, Hugh H. Davis, Mark Dawidziak, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, James Golden, Alan Gribben, Benjamin Griffin, Ronald Jenn, Holger Kersten, Andrew Levy, Cindy Lovell, Karen Lystra, Debra Ann MacComb, Peter Messent, Linda A. Morris, K. Patrick Ober, John R. Pascal, Lucy E. Rollin, Barbara Schmidt, David E. E. Sloane, Henry Sweets, Wendelinus Wurth.

Download or read book Mark Twain s Autobiography written by Mark Twain and published by . This book was released on 1924 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book American Boy written by Don Brown and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2006-05-22 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Lighting Out for the Territory written by Roy Jr. Morris and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-03-02 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the very last paragraph of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the title character gloomily reckons that it’s time “to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.” Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally is trying to “sivilize” him, and Huck Finn can’t stand it—he’s been there before. It’s a decision Huck’s creator already had made, albeit for somewhat different reasons, a quarter of a century earlier. He wasn’t even Mark Twain then, but as Huck might have said, “That ain’t no matter.” With the Civil War spreading across his native Missouri, twenty-five-year-old Samuel Clemens, suddenly out of work as a Mississippi riverboat pilot, gladly accepted his brother Orion’s offer to join him in Nevada Territory, far from the crimsoned battlefields of war. A rollicking, hilarious stagecoach journey across the Great Plains and over the Rocky Mountains was just the beginning of a nearly six-year-long odyssey that took Samuel Clemens from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Hawaii, with lengthy stopovers in Virginia City, Nevada, and San Francisco. By the time it was over, he would find himself reborn as Mark Twain, America’s best-loved, most influential writer. The “trouble,” as he famously promised, had begun. With a pitch-perfect blend of appreciative humor and critical authority, acclaimed literary biographer Roy Morris, Jr., sheds new light on this crucial but still largely unexamined period in Mark Twain’s life. Morris carefully sorts fact from fiction—never an easy task when dealing with Twain—to tell the story of a young genius finding his voice in the ramshackle mining camps, boomtowns, and newspaper offices of the wild and woolly West, while the Civil War rages half a continent away. With the frequent help of Twain’s own words, Morris follows his subject on a winding journey of selfdiscovery filled with high adventure and low comedy, as Clemens/Twain dodges Indians and gunfighters, receives marriage advice from Brigham Young, burns down a mountain with a frying pan, gets claim-jumped by rival miners, narrowly avoids fighting a duel, hikes across the floor of an active volcano, becomes one of the first white men to try the ancient Hawaiian sport of surfing, and writes his first great literary success, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Lighting Out for the Territory is a fascinating, even inspiring, account of how an unemployed riverboat pilot, would-be Confederate guerrilla, failed prospector, neophyte newspaper reporter, and parttime San Francisco aesthete reinvented himself as America’s most famous and beloved writer. It’s a good story, and mostly true—with some stretchers thrown in for good measure.

Download or read book Mark Twain s Aquarium written by Samuel Langhorne Clemens and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2009-09-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "What I lacked and what I needed," confessed Samuel Clemens in 1908, "was grandchildren." Near the end of his life, Clemens became the doting friend and correspondent of twelve schoolgirls ranging in age from ten to sixteen. For Clemens, "collecting" these surrogate granddaughters was a way of overcoming his loneliness, a respite from the pessimism, illness, and depression that dominated his later years. In Mark Twain's Aquarium, John Cooley brings together virtually every known communication exchanged between the writer and the girls he called his "angelfish." Cooley also includes a number of Clemens's notebook entries, autobiographical dictations, short manuscripts, and other relevant materials that further illuminate this fascinating story. Clemens relished the attention of these girls, orchestrating chaperoned visits to his homes and creating an elaborate set of rules and emblems for the Aquarium Club. He hung their portraits in his billiard room and invented games and plays for their amusement. For much of 1908, he was sending and receiving a letter a week from his angelfish. Cooley argues that Clemens saw cheerfulness and laughter as his only defenses against the despair of his late years. His enchantment with children, years before, had given birth to such characters as Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Huck Finn. In the frivolities of the Aquarium Club, it found its final expression. Cooley finds no evidence of impropriety in Clemens behavior with the girls. Perhaps his greatest crime, the editor suggests, was in idealizing them, in regarding them as precious collectibles. "He tried to trap them in the amber of endless adolescence," Cooley writes. "By pleading that they stay young and innocent, he was perhaps attempting to deny that, as they and the world continued to change, so must he."

Download or read book Mark Twain And The South written by Arthur G. Pettit and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Twain Alcott and the Birth of the Adolescent Reform Novel written by Roberta S. Trites and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2009-11 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trites argues that Twain and Alcott wrote on similar topics because they were so deeply affected by the Civil War, by cataclysmic emotional and financial losses in their families, by their cultural immersion in the tenets of Protestant philosophy, and by sexual tensions that may have stimulated their interest in writing for adolescents, Trites demonstrates how the authors participated in a cultural dynamic that marked the changing nature of adolescence in America, provoking a literary sentiment that continues to inform young adult literature. Both intuited that the transitory nature of adolescence makes it ripe for expression about human potential for change and reform.

Download or read book Why We Took the Car written by Wolfgang Herrndorf and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully written, darkly funny coming-of-age story from an award-winning, bestselling German author making his American debut. Mike Klingenberg doesn't get why people think he's boring. Sure, he doesn't have many friends. (Okay, zero friends.) And everyone laughs at him when he reads his essays out loud in class. And he's never invited to parties - including the gorgeous Tatiana's party of the year.Andre Tschichatschow, aka Tschick (not even the teachers can pronounce his name), is new in school, and a whole different kind of unpopular. He always looks like he's just been in a fight, his clothes are tragic, and he never talks to anyone.But one day Tschick shows up at Mike's house out of the blue. Turns out he wasn't invited to Tatiana's party either, and he's ready to do something about it. Forget the popular kids: Together, Mike and Tschick are heading out on a road trip. No parents, no map, no destination. Will they get hopelessly lost in the middle of nowhere? Probably. Will meet some crazy people and get into serious trouble? Definitely. But will they ever be called boring again? Not a chance.

Download or read book The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain written by Mark Twain and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Familiarity breeds contempt — and children." "When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear." "Heaven for climate. Hell for company." This attractive paperback gift edition of the renowned American humorist's epigrams and witticisms features hundreds of quips on life, love, history, culture, travel, and other topics from his fiction, essays, letters, and autobiography.

Download or read book Aurelia s Unfortunate Young Man written by Mark Twain and published by Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-22 with total page 7 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Now that corpse," said the undertaker, patting the folded hands of deceased approvingly, "was a brick—every way you took him he was a brick. He was so real accommodating, and so modest-like and simple in his last moments. Friends wanted metallic burial-case—nothing else would do. I couldn't get it. There warn't going to be time—anybody could see that. "Corpse said never mind, shake him up some kind of a box he could stretch out in comfortable, he warn't particular 'bout the general style of it. Said he went more on room than style, anyway in a last final container…

Download or read book Mark Twain written by John S. Tuckey and published by . This book was released on 1990-04-01 with total page 17 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Mark Twain at Your Fingertips written by Mark Twain and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2009-11-18 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of America's greatest storytellers, Samuel Clemens had something witty and wise to say on just about any topic. Gathered from his classic novels, diary entries, newspaper articles, and correspondence, this collection of wry quips and quotes reflects his keen observations on animals, critics, doctors, laughter, politics, youth, and more.

Download or read book The Trouble Begins at 8 written by Sid Fleischman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2008-07-29 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Mark Twain was born fully grown, with a cheap cigar clamped between his teeth." So begins Sid Fleischman's ramble-scramble biography of the great American author and wit, who started life in a Missouri village as a barefoot boy named Samuel Clemens. Abandoning a career as a young steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, Sam took a bumpy stagecoach to the Far West. In the gold and silver fields, he expected to get rich quick. Instead, he got poor fast, digging in the wrong places. His stint as a sagebrush newspaperman led to a duel with pistols. Had he not survived, the world would never have heard of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn—or red-headed Mark Twain. Samuel Clemens adopted his pen name in a hotel room in San Francisco and promptly made a jumping frog (and himself) famous. His celebrated novels followed at a leisurely pace; his quips at jet speed. "Don't let schooling interfere with your education," he wrote. Here, in high style, is the story of a wisecracking adventurer who came of age in the untamed West; an ink-stained rebel who surprised himself by becoming the most famous American of his time. Bountifully illustrated.

Download or read book Mark Twain written by Miriam E. Mason and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-06-30 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samuel Langhorne Clemens is perhaps best known by his pen name Mark Twain. He was a writer of such classic American novels as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, served as an apprentice printer, and wrote newspaper articles. Later he was a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to work as a miner. Eventually he settled on writing as a career. Mark Twain was born shortly after a visit by Halley's Comet, and he predicted that he would "go out with it", too. He died the day following the comet's return. Now readers can explore how his childhood influenced his life.

Download or read book The Prince and the Pauper written by Mark Twain and published by Cosimo Classics. This book was released on 1882 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A simplified retelling of the Mark Twain classic in which young Edward VI of England and a poor boy who resembles him exchange places and each learns something about the other's very different station in life.

Download or read book Mark Twain written by John S. Tuckey and published by . This book was released on 1990-04 with total page 17 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Mark Twain written by Mark Twain and published by Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.. This book was released on 2005 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A simple retelling of five stories by Mark Twain, in which he pokes fun at newspapers, Victorian manners, obedience to one's parents, the British, and perceptions of reality.