Download or read book Our Famous Guest written by Carl Richard Dolmetsch and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fin-de-siecle Vienna was a special place at a special time, a city in which the decadent abandon of the era commingled with dark forebodings of the coming century. The artistic and intellectual ferment of the Austrian capital was extraordinary: Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arthur Schnitzler, Theodor Herzl, Gustave Klimt, and Ludwig Wittgenstein were but a few of the figures who lived and worked there. And, in September 1897, into the very midst of this heady milieu, came America's most famous citizen, Mark Twain. Although most of Twain's biographers have mentioned his Viennese sojourn (occasioned by his daughter Clara's musical studies), it has remained an unexplored hiatus in his career. Partly because of impressions created by Twain himself, the twenty months he spent in Vienna are often dismissed as uneventful and unproductive. In "Our Famous Guest" Carl Dolmetsch shows the truth to be otherwise. Upon his arrival Twain found all the doors of the celebrity-mad city, from its literary cafe's to its aristocratic salons, flung wide open to him. The aging writer imbibed freely of Vienna's atmosphere, and the result was a final, astonishing surge of creativity. Among the thirty works that came, either whole or in part, from Twain's Austrian visit were the Socratic dialogue What Is Man?, the "Early Days" section of his Autobiography, Book I of Christian Science, the classic short story "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," the polemical essay "Concerning the Jews," and, most important, a major portion of the manuscript cluster known as The Mysterious Stranger. As Dolmetsch notes, conventional wisdom about Twain attributes the "bitter pessimism" of these late writings to such factors as his personal bereavements and financial reversals. Rejecting this view as grossly oversimplified, Dolmetsch argues that the transformation in Twain's outlook and writing style owe much to the cultural currents he encountered abroad, above all in Vienna. He suggests that Twain was especially responsive to a peculiarly Viennese blend of nihilism and hedonism and to the "impressionistic" style favored by its writers. In locating these influences, Dolmetsch portrays a Mark Twain far more cosmopolitan and urbane than previous biographical studies have allowed. Through meticulous research in Viennese newspaper reports as well as in Twain's own journals and writings, Dolmetsch reconstructs the writer's visit in breathtaking detail. The narrative sparkles with accounts of Twain's shrewd manipulation of the Viennese press, his involvements in the city's musical and theatrical life, the attacks he endured from anti-Semitic journalists, and even his futile attempts to obtain marketing rights to two inventions by a Polish engineer. In one particularly intriguing chapter Dolmetsch ponders the riddle of Twain's association with Freud (who was then virtually unknown outside of Vienna) and their congruent fascination with the relationship between dreams and "reality." An invaluable addition to Twain scholarship, "Our Famous Guest" is equally compelling for the glimpse it offers of a vanished world.
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 Mark Twain at Your Fingertips written by Mark Twain and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-07-12 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gathered from Twain's classic novels, diary entries, newspaper articles, and correspondence, this collection of wry quips and quotes offers the great humorist and storyteller's observations on animals, critics, politics, youth, and more.
Download or read book Traveling Back written by Susan McWilliams and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014-03 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to think globally? Susan McWilliams argues that to understand politics in our 'new world,' we should revisit one of the oldest themes in political theory: travel. This title uncovers the rich travel-story tradition of political theorizing and shows how it helps to answer today's toughest political questions.
Download or read book Mark Twain s Autobiography written by Mark Twain and published by . This book was released on 1924 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected from Mark Twain's typescript.
Download or read book Mark My Words written by Mark Twain and published by St Martins Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Provides a personal look at the man behind the writing through an amusing collection of his expressed opinions and thoughts on such topics as such as fellow writers, authors, editors, children's books, humor, and public speakers.
Download or read book My Mark Twain written by William Dean Howells and published by . This book was released on 1910 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reminiscences of Howells' friendship with Mark Twain, followed by criticism of about a dozen of his major works (chiefly book reviews previously published in various periodicals).
Download or read book The Adventures of Mark Twain by Huckleberry Finn written by Robert Burleigh and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-10-21 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Mark Twain s Book of Animals written by Mark Twain and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011-07 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For those unaware—as I was until I read this book—that Mark Twain was one of America's early animal advocates, Shelley Fisher Fishkin's collection of his writings on animals will come as a revelation. Many of these pieces are as fresh and lively as when they were first written, and it's wonderful to have them gathered in one place." —Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation and The Life You Can Save “A truly exhilarating work. Mark Twain's animal-friendly views would not be out of place today, and indeed, in certain respects, Twain is still ahead of us: claiming, correctly, that there are certain degraded practices that only humans inflict on one another and upon other animals. Fishkin has done a splendid job: I cannot remember reading something so consistently excellent."—Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, author of When Elephants Weep and The Face on Your Plate "Shelley Fisher Fishkin has given us the lifelong arc of the great man's antic, hilarious, and subtly profound explorations of the animal world, and she's guided us through it with her own trademark wit and acumen. Dogged if she hasn't." —Ron Powers, author of Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain and Mark Twain: A Life
Download or read book Acting Naturally written by Randall K. Knoper and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Clarifies why understanding Mark Twain's writing is essential to understanding enduring patterns and problems in American culture. Conversely, it compellingly illustrates why one does not fully understand Mark Twain's work unless one has some understanding of America's preoccupation with performance, conspicuous display, and the mental sciences."--Howard Horwitz, author of "By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America" "In place of the strictly literary frame of reference that has previously organized the Twain canon, Knoper productively focuses on the spectrum of theatrical attitudes whereby Twain reconfigured his culture's race and gender hierarchies into the power to construct social realities differently. This work is sure to play a significant role in the reinvention of Mark Twain for the New American Studies."--Donald E. Pease, editor of "Revisionary Interventions into the Americanist Canon" "Knoper takes up quintessential aspects of Twain's writings, mind, and career. . . . [He] is brilliant in enunciating clearly and coherently ideas and attitudes that Twain either held confusedly or intimated almost unintentionally."--Louis J. Budd, author of "Our Mark Twain"
Download or read book Chapters from My Autobiography written by Mark Twain and published by ReadHowYouWant.com. This book was released on 2008-10-16 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Books for All Kinds of Readers. ReadHowYouWant offers the widest selection of on-demand, accessible format editions on the market today. Each edition has been optimized for maximum readability, using our patent-pending conversion technology. We are partnering with leading publishers around the globe to create accessible editions of their titles. Our goal is to have accessible editions simultaneously released with publishers new books so that all readers can have access to the books they want to read - today.
Download or read book The Extraordinary Mark Twain according to Susy written by Barbara Kerley and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2010 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thirteen-year-old Susy Clemens wants the world to know that her papa, Mark Twain, is more than just a humorist and sets out to write a comprehensive biography of the American icon.
Download or read book Mr Clemens and Mark Twain written by Justin Kaplan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-06-30 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.”
Download or read book Mark Twain written by Ron Powers and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-09-04 with total page 1176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Autobiography of Mark Twain Volume 3 written by Mark Twain and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 792 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The surprising final chapter of a great American life. When the first volume of Mark Twain’s uncensored Autobiography was published in 2010, it was hailed as an essential addition to the shelf of his works and a crucial document for our understanding of the great humorist’s life and times. This third and final volume crowns and completes his life’s work. Like its companion volumes, it chronicles Twain's inner and outer life through a series of daily dictations that go wherever his fancy leads. Created from March 1907 to December 1909, these dictations present Mark Twain at the end of his life: receiving an honorary degree from Oxford University; railing against Theodore Roosevelt; founding numerous clubs; incredulous at an exhibition of the Holy Grail; credulous about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays; relaxing in Bermuda; observing (and investing in) new technologies. The Autobiography’s "Closing Words" movingly commemorate his daughter Jean, who died on Christmas Eve 1909. Also included in this volume is the previously unpublished "Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript," Mark Twain’s caustic indictment of his "putrescent pair" of secretaries and the havoc that erupted in his house during their residency. Fitfully published in fragments at intervals throughout the twentieth century, Autobiography of Mark Twain has now been critically reconstructed and made available as it was intended to be read. Fully annotated by the editors of the Mark Twain Project, the complete Autobiography emerges as a landmark publication in American literature. Editors: Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith Associate Editors: Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Amanda Gagel, Sharon K. Goetz, Leslie Diane Myrick, Christopher M. Ohge
Download or read book Mark Twain written by Ron Powers and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2005-09-20 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ron Powers’s tour de force has been widely acclaimed as the best life and times, filled with Mark Twain’s voice, and as a great American story. Samuel Clemens, the man known as Mark Twain, invented the American voice and became one of our greatest celebrities. His life mirrored his country's, as he grew from a Mississippi River boyhood in the days of the frontier, to a Wild-West journalist during the Gold Rush, to become the king of the eastern establishment and a global celebrity as America became an international power. Along the way, Mark Twain keenly observed the characters and voices that filled the growing country, and left us our first authentically American literature. Ron Powers's magnificent biography offers the definitive life of the founding father of our culture.
Download or read book History of the Big Bonanza written by William Wright and published by Franklin Classics. This book was released on 2018-10-13 with total page 636 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 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. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
