May 21, 2025
Mark Twain
Three Paris Readers Circle members will be selected at random to win a copy
Before he was Mark Twain, he was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Born in 1835, the man who would become America’s first, and most influential, literary celebrity spent his childhood dreaming of piloting steamboats on the Mississippi. But when the Civil War interrupted his career on the river, the young Twain went west to the Nevada Territory and accepted a job at a local newspaper, writing dispatches that attracted attention for their brashness and humor. It wasn’t long before the former steamboat pilot from Missouri was recognized across the country for his literary brilliance, writing under a pen name that he would immortalize.–1033 pages
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain
If you don't have the time to take Mr. Chernow's Phd course in Twain, Mr. Kaplan's Pulitzer prize winning work will be fine.
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.”
190 years after his birth his books are still read and his witticisms are part of our American cultural heritage.
Born in the south (Florida, Mo) in 1835 without a college education he wrote best-seller after best-seller, was in international demand as a public speaker/lecturer and would have amassed an enormous fortune were he not such an incompetent businessman constantly succumbing to get rich schemes.
He held no discriminatory views and possessed enormous goodwill toward the Black community, whether paying for theYale Law School education of Walter McGuinn or supporting the Fisk University Jubiliee Singers.
As for Jews, he was a philo-Semite–"They are peculiarly & conspicuously the world's intellectual aristocracy."
His a life well-lived and worth examining.
5 PRC Members will win a book-not a member? Join today
This Library of America book, with its companion volume,, is the most comprehensive collection ever published of Mark Twain’s short writings — the incomparable stories, sketches, burlesques, hoaxes, tall tales, speeches, satires, and maxims of America’s greatest humorist. Arranged chronologically and containing many pieces restored to the form in which Twain intended them to appear, the volumes show with unprecedented clarity the literary evolution of Mark Twain over six decades of his career.
Innocents Abroad
One of the most famous travel books ever written by an American, The Innocents Abroad is Mark Twain’s irreverent and incisive commentary on nineteenth century Americans encountering the Old World.
No person or place is safe from Twain’s sharp wit as it impales both the conservative and the liberal, the Old World and the New. He uses these contrasts to “find out who we as Americans are,” notes Leslie A. Fiedler. But his travelogue demonstrates that, in our attempt to understand ourselves, we must first find out what we are not.
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