Download or read book Mark Twain s Homes and Literary Tourism written by Hilary Iris Lowe and published by University of Missouri Press. This book was released on 2012-07-20 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A century after Samuel Clemens’s death, Mark Twain thrives—his recently released autobiography topped bestseller lists. One way fans still celebrate the first true American writer and his work is by visiting any number of Mark Twain destinations. They believe they can learn something unique by visiting the places where he lived. Mark Twain’s Homes and Literary Tourism untangles the complicated ways that Clemens’s houses, now museums, have come to tell the stories that they do about Twain and, in the process, reminds us that the sites themselves are the products of multiple agendas and, in some cases, unpleasant histories. Hilary Iris Lowe leads us through four Twain homes, beginning at the beginning—Florida, Missouri, where Clemens was born. Today the site is simply a concrete pedestal missing its bust, a plaque, and an otherwise-empty field. Though the original cabin where he was born likely no longer exists, Lowe treats us to an overview of the history of the area and the state park challenged with somehow marking this site. Next, we travel with Lowe to Hannibal, Missouri, Clemens’s childhood home, which he saw become a tourist destination in his own lifetime. Today mannequins remind visitors of the man that the boy who lived there became and the literature that grew out of his experiences in the house and little town on the Mississippi. Hartford, Connecticut, boasts one of Clemens’s only surviving adulthood homes, the house where he spent his most productive years. Lowe describes the house’s construction, its sale when the high cost of living led the family to seek residence abroad, and its transformation into the museum. Lastly, we travel to Elmira, New York, where Clemens spent many summers with his family at Quarry Farm. His study is the only room at this destination open to the public, and yet, tourists follow in the footsteps of literary pilgrim Rudyard Kipling to see this small space. Literary historic sites pin their authority on the promise of exclusive insight into authors and texts through firsthand experience. As tempting as it is to accept the authenticity of Clemens’s homes, Mark Twain’s Homes and Literary Tourism argues that house museums are not reliable critical texts but are instead carefully constructed spaces designed to satisfy visitors. This volume shows us how these houses’ portrayals of Clemens change frequently to accommodate and shape our own expectations of the author and his work.
Download or read book Literary Destinations written by Hilary Iris Lowe and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mark Twain Travel Books and Tourism written by Jeffrey Alan Melton and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2002-06-26 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grounding this study in tourist theory, Melton explores how, in five travel books, Twain captures the birth and growth of a new creature who would go on to change the map of the world: the American tourist."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Visitor Experience at the Mark Twain House written by Stephanie C. Fox and published by QueenBeeBooks. This book was released on 2020-04-18 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains a tour that I gave as a historic interpreter at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut. It takes the readers from the front lawn to the porch to the hall, then goes room by room throughout the author’s family home, telling the story of the wonderful life they all lived in a house that felt alive to them for seventeen years. I did this for several years, and it enabled me to learn all about the author and his family, and to read many of his works. It also led me to meet many fascinating and fun members of the public as I showed them around and told them hilarious, uproarious tales of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain, in the manner of a stand-up comic. They loved it, as did I. Many of these visitors made a wonderful remark to me at the conclusion of tour after tour after tour: “That was the best tour I have ever had anywhere. I wish I could buy a copy of it. You should write your tour down, as is.” So, I did.
Download or read book The Loveliest Home That Ever Was written by Steve Courtney and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The official guide to The Mark Twain House & Museum, this volume tells the dramatic story of the famous author and his family and their Victorian mansion. The history of the house and its residents is illustrated with architectural drawings and period photos as well as dozens of new color images of the building's magnificent exterior and interior.
Download or read book A Skeptic s Guide to Writers Houses written by Anne Trubek and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2011-07-11 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are many ways to show our devotion to an author besides reading his or her works. Graves make for popular pilgrimage sites, but far more popular are writers' house museums. What is it we hope to accomplish by trekking to the home of a dead author? We may go in search of the point of inspiration, eager to stand on the very spot where our favorite literary characters first came to life—and find ourselves instead in the house where the author himself was conceived, or where she drew her last breath. Perhaps it is a place through which our writer passed only briefly, or maybe it really was a longtime home—now thoroughly remade as a decorator's show-house. In A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses Anne Trubek takes a vexed, often funny, and always thoughtful tour of a goodly number of house museums across the nation. In Key West she visits the shamelessly ersatz shrine to a hard-living Ernest Hemingway, while meditating on his lost Cuban farm and the sterile Idaho house in which he committed suicide. In Hannibal, Missouri, she walks the fuzzy line between fact and fiction, as she visits the home of the young Samuel Clemens—and the purported haunts of Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Injun' Joe. She hits literary pay-dirt in Concord, Massachusetts, the nineteenth-century mecca that gave home to Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau—and yet could not accommodate a surprisingly complex Louisa May Alcott. She takes us along the trail of residences that Edgar Allan Poe left behind in the wake of his many failures and to the burned-out shell of a California house with which Jack London staked his claim on posterity. In Dayton, Ohio, a charismatic guide brings Paul Laurence Dunbar to compelling life for those few visitors willing to listen; in Cleveland, Trubek finds a moving remembrance of Charles Chesnutt in a house that no longer stands. Why is it that we visit writers' houses? Although admittedly skeptical about the stories these buildings tell us about their former inhabitants, Anne Trubek carries us along as she falls at least a little bit in love with each stop on her itinerary and finds in each some truth about literature, history, and contemporary America.
Download or read book Mark Twain at Home written by Michael J. Kiskis and published by University of Alabama Press. This book was released on 2016-06-15 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the influence of domesticity on the writing and career of Samuel Clemens, reframing with rich biographical detail and historical context Twain's major late-nineteenth century work
Download or read book Travels at Home written by Mark Twain and published by Palala Press. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Mark Twain The Innocents Abroad Roughing It LOA 21 written by Mark Twain and published by Library of America. This book was released on 1984-12-01 with total page 1078 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Library of America volume contains the novels that, when published, transformed an obscure Western journalist into a national celebrity. The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It (sometimes called The Innocents at Home) were immensely successful when first published and they remain today the most popular travel books ever written. The Innocents Abroad (1869), based largely on letters written for New York and San Francisco papers, narrates the progress of the first American organized tour of Europe—to Naples, Smyrna, Constantinople, and Palestine. In his account Mark Twain assumes two alternate roles: at times the no-nonsense American who refuses to automatically venerate the famous sights of the Old World (preferring Lake Tahoe to Lake Como), or at times the put-upon simpleton, a gullible victim of flatterers and “frauds,” and an awestruck admirer of Russian royalty. The result is a hilarious blend of vaudevillian comedy, actual travel guide, and stinging satire, directed at both the complacency of his fellow American travelers and their reverence for European relics. Out of the book emerges the first full-dress portrait of Mark Twain himself, the breezy, shrewd, and comical manipulator of English idioms and America’s mythologies about itself and its relation to the past. Roughing It (1872) is the lighthearted account of Mark Twain’s actual and imagined adventures when he escaped the Civil War and joined his brother, the recently appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory. His accounts of stagecoach travel, Native Americans, frontier society, the Mormons, the Chinese, and the codes, dress, food, and customs of the West are interspersed with his own experiences as a prospector, miner, journalist, boon companion, and lecturer as he traveled through Nevada, Utah, California, and even to the Hawaiian Islands. Mark Twain’s passage from tenderfoot to old-timer is accomplished through a long series of increasingly comical episodes. The plot is relaxed enough to accommodate some immensely funny and random character sketches, animal fables, tall tales, and dramatic monologues. The result is an enduring picture of the old Western frontier in all its original vigor and variety. In these two works, never before brought together so compactly, Mark Twain achieves his mastery of the vernacular style. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Download or read book The Introspective Art of Mark Twain written by Douglas Anderson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-04-20 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A new reading of the major themes and concerns of Mark Twain's life and work, tracing the development of his imagination from his earliest works in 1865 to his writings in the early twentieth century"--
Download or read book Life on the Mississippi written by Mark Twain and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1985-02-05 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1882 Mark Twain returned to the river of his childhood, determined to write the definitive travel book on the Mississippi. Life on the Mississippi is no ordinary guided tour, for every page is expressive of the structure, style and high humour that is the very essence of Twain the writer. Spiced with Twain's pungent observations and commentaries on the culture and society of the great river valley, the book is a wonderful collection of lively anecdotes, tall tales and character sketches; historical facts and information; and reminiscences of the author's boyhood and experiences as a steamboat pilot. Life on the Mississippi, in its composition and substance, is intricately related to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In his introduction, James M. Cox suggests that in writing this travelogue Twain discovered the truths that form the heart of the odyssey depicted in his masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Download or read book Mark Twain A Tramp Abroad Following the Equator Other Travels LOA 200 written by Mark Twain and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2010-03-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was as a humorous travel writer, in The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It, that Mark Twain first became widely known, and at the height of his career he returned to the genre in the works collected here. Like those earlier books, the frequently hilarious A Tramp Abroad (1880)-based on his family's 16-month sojourn in Europe from April 1878 to August 1879-blends autobiography and fiction, facts and tall tales. Twain's send-up of Old World customs as well as his critical dissections of Wagnerian opera and the German language are often interlaced with American reminiscences, whether in the form of an extended discourse on the language of blue jays or the recollection of an elaborate practical joke in Hannibal, Missouri, involving a printer's devil and a skeleton. A Tramp Abroad is presented here with the author's original sketches. Written at a time of financial trouble and personal loss (the death of the author's beloved daughter Susy), Following the Equator (1897) is a darker and more politicized account of a lecture tour around the world, with Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, India, Mauritius, and South Africa among the stopovers. Using humorous but often biting anecdotes as well as keen journalist reporting, the book details bush life in Australia and the culture of the Maoris in New Zealand, while lashing out at social inequities such as the Indian caste system, and racist imperialism connected with European settlement and gold mining in southern Africa. Twain rounds out the volume with extensive historical accounts ranging from the Black Hole of Calcutta to the events in South Africa that would lead shortly to the Boer War. This volume also includes 13 shorter pieces, most of them uncollected by the author, including a lengthy firsthand narrative of the shah of Persia's 1873 visit to London, an 1891 description of Richard Wagner's operas performed at Bayreuth, an 1897 account of Queen Victoria's jubilee in London, and an 1898 analysis of vitriolic Austrian parliamentary proceedings. The texts of several of these "other travels" are presented in newly corrected and fully restored versions. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Download or read book The Renaissance of Mark Twain s House written by Wilson H. Faude and published by Amereon Limited. This book was released on 1978 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Innocents at Home written by Mark Twain and published by Palala Press. This book was released on 2015-12-13 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book Mark Twain s Notebooks and Journals Volume III written by Mark Twain and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-12-22 with total page 894 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume III of Mark Twain's notebooks spans the years 1883 to 1891, a period during which Mark Twain's personal fortunes reached their zenith, as he emerged as one of the most successful authors and publishers in American literary history. During these years Life on the Mississippi, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court appeared, revealing the diversity, depth, and vitality of Mark Twain's literary talents. With his speeches, his public performances, and his lecture tour of 1884/1885, he became the most recognizable of national figures. At the same time, Mark Twain's growing fame and prosperity allowed him to plunge deeply into the business world, a sphere not suited to his erratic energies. He created the subscription publish firm of Charles L. Webster & Company, Which published the most profitable book of its time, the Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant. And he became the primary financial support for the ingenious but imperfectible Paige typesetter. Within a few years both the publishing company and the typesetter had taxed Mark Twain's patience, and pocket, beyond endurance. The near bankruptcy of the publishing firm and the debacle of the typesetter scheme finally resulted in 1891 in a drastic decision--to leave the house in Hartford, Connecticut, which had long been the symbol of Mark Twain's rising fortunes and idyllic family life, and move to Europe for an indefinite period in the hope of reducing the family's living expenses. The Clemens family would never return to the Hartford house, and the European stay would lengthen into an almost unbroken nine years of exile. Mark Twain's notebooks permit an intimate view of this turbulent period, whose triumphs were tempered by intimations of financial disaster and personal bitterness.
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 Mrs Mark Twain written by Martin Naparsteck and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2013-12-03 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.
