Download or read book Mark Twain in the Company of Women written by Laura E. Skandera Trombley and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 1997-02 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The field of Mark Twain biography has been dominated by men, and Samuel Clemens himself - riverboat pilot, Western correspondent, silver prospector, world traveler - has been traditionally portrayed as a man's man. The publication of Laura E. Skandera-Trombley's Mark Twain in the Company of Women, however, marks a significant departure from conventional scholarship. Skandera-Trombley, the first woman to write a scholarly biography of Mark Twain, contends that Clemens intentionally surrounded himself with women, and that his capacity to produce extended fictions had almost as much to do with the environment shaped by his female family as with the talent and genius of the writer himself. Women helped Clemens to define his boundaries, both personal and literary. Women shaped his life, edited his books, and provided models for his fictional characters. Clemens read and corresponded with female authors, and often actively promoted their careers. Skandera-Trombley seeks to combine a biographical study of Clemens's life with his beloved wife, Olivia (Livy) Langdon, and their three daughters, Susy, Clara, and Jean, with new readings of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. Several crucial areas are investigated: the nature of Clemens's family participation in his writing process, the degree to which their experiences as women during the mid- and late nineteenth century affected his writing, and the extent to which the loss of his family may have impeded and ultimately ended his ability to write lengthy narratives. Skandera-Trombley points out that in marrying Livy, Clemens not only joined a family of substantial means, but also entered one active in thesuffragist, abolitionist, and other reformist movements, which had deep roots in the progressive community of Elmira, New York. Mark Twain in the Company of Women will be of interest to Twain scholars and readers as well as students in American studies, women's studies, nineteenth-century history, and political and cultural studies.
Download or read book Mark Twain s Other Woman written by Laura Skandera Trombley and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-03-08 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Women and things written by Mark Twain and published by . This book was released on 1906 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mark and Livy written by Resa Willis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-06-01 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
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 Women in Mark Twain s World written by Harold Smith and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 31 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mrs Mark Twain written by Martin Naparsteck and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2013-12-06 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A Historical Guide to Mark Twain written by Shelley Fisher Fishkin and published by Historical Guides to American Authors. This book was released on 2002 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Twain is still one of the most enduring and beloved of America's great writers. In this guide to Twain, his life and times and the historical context in which he operated Shelley Fisher Fishkin assembles original essays by leading scholars that describe and define the man.
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain written by Forrest G. Robinson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1995-05-26 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain offers new and thought provoking essays on an author of enduring pre-eminence in the American canon. The book is a collaborative project, assembled by scholars who have played crucial roles in the recent explosion of Twain criticism. Accessible enough to interest both experienced specialists and students new to Twain criticism, the essays examine Twain from a wide variety of critical perspectives, and include timely reflections by major critics on the hotly debated dynamics of race and slavery perceptible throughout his writing. The volume includes a chronology of Twain's life and a list of suggestions for further reading, to provide the students or general reader with sources for background as well as additional information.
Download or read book Dangerous Intimacy written by Karen Lystra and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this reflective volume, breakthrough scholarship revises the biography of Mark Twain and presents important new information and new interpretations about the last decade of his life.
Download or read book The Mercurial Mark Twain s written by James L. Machor and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who was Mark Twain? Was he the genial author of two beloved boys books, the white-haired and white-suited avuncular humorist, the realistic novelist, the exposer of shams, the author repressed by bourgeois values, or the social satirist whose later writings embody an increasingly dark view? In light of those and other conceptions, the question we need to ask is not who he was but how did we get so many Mark Twains? The Mercurial Mark Twains(s): Reception History and Iconic Authorship provides answers to that question by examining the way Twain, his texts, and his image have been constructed by his audiences. Drawing on archival records of responses from common readers, reviewer reactions, analyses by Twain scholars and critics, and film and television adaptations, this study provides the first wide-ranging, fine-grained historical analysis of Twain’s reception in both the public and private spheres, from the 1860s until the end of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age written by Harold K. Bush and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2007-01-07 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mark Twain is often pictured as a severe critic of religious piety, shaking his fist at God and mocking the devout. This book highlights Twain's attractions to and engagements with the variety of religious phenomena of America in his lifetime. It offers a more complicated understanding of Twain and his literary output.
Download or read book A New Orleans Author in Mark Twain s Court written by Miki Pfeffer and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2019-11-11 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shortly after Grace King wrote her first stories in post-Reconstruction New Orleans, she entered a world of famous figures and literary giants greater than she could ever have imagined. Notable writers and publishers of the Northeast bolstered her career, and she began a decades-long friendship with Mark Twain and his family that was as unlikely as it was remarkable. Beginning in 1887, King paid long visits to the homes of friends and associates in New England and benefited from their extended circles. She interacted with her mentor, Charles Dudley Warner; writers Harriet Beecher Stowe and William Dean Howells; painter Frederic E. Church; suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker; Chaucer scholar Thomas Lounsbury; impresario Augustin Daly; actor Will Gillette;cleric Joseph Twichell; and other stars of the era. As compelling as a novel, this audacious story of King’s northern ties unfolds in eloquent letters. They hint at the fictional themes that would end up in her own art; they trace her development from literary novice to sophisticated businesswoman who leverages her own independence and success. Through excerpts from scores of new transcriptions, as well as contextualizing narrative and annotations, Miki Pfeffer weaves a cultural tapestry that includes King’s volatile southern family as it struggles to reclaim antebellum status and a Gilded Age northern community that ignores inevitable change. King’s correspondence with the Clemens family reveals incomparable affection. As a regular guest in their household, she quickly distinguished “Mark,” the rowdy public persona, from “Mr. Clemens,” the loving husband of Livy and father of Susy, Clara, and Jean, all of whom King came to know intimately. Their unguarded, casual revelations of heartbreaks and joys tell something more than the usual Twain lore, and they bring King into sharper focus. All of their existing letters are gathered here, many published for the first time. A New Orleans Author in Mark Twain’s Court paints a fascinating picture of the northern literary personalities who caused King’s budding career to blossom.
Download or read book Mark Twain s Women written by Linda Evans and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mark Twain s Women written by Resa Ann Holsapple Willis and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Making Mark Twain Work in the Classroom written by James S. Leonard and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of articles on Twain's work expressing a broad range of critical perspectives and pedagogical methods, intended to address race, gender and class issues in the classroom.
Download or read book Writing with Scissors written by Ellen Gruber Garvey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-02 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Men and women 150 years ago grappled with information overload by making scrapbooks-the ancestors of Google and blogging. From Abraham Lincoln to Susan B. Anthony, African American janitors to farmwomen, abolitionists to Confederates, people cut out and pasted down their reading. Writing with Scissors opens a new window into the feelings and thoughts of ordinary and extraordinary Americans. Like us, nineteenth-century readers spoke back to the media, and treasured what mattered to them. In this groundbreaking book, Ellen Gruber Garvey reveals a previously unexplored layer of American popular culture, where the proliferating cheap press touched the lives of activists and mourning parents, and all who yearned for a place in history. Scrapbook makers documented their feelings about momentous public events such as living through the Civil War, mediated through the newspapers. African Americans and women's rights activists collected, concentrated, and critiqued accounts from a press that they did not control to create "unwritten histories" in books they wrote with scissors. Whether scrapbook makers pasted their clippings into blank books, sermon collections, or the pre-gummed scrapbook that Mark Twain invented, they claimed ownership of their reading. They created their own democratic archives. Writing with Scissors argues that people have long had a strong personal relationship to media. Like newspaper editors who enthusiastically "scissorized" and reprinted attractive items from other newspapers, scrapbook makers passed their reading along to family and community. This book explains how their scrapbooks underlie our present-day ways of thinking about information, news, and what we do with it.
