Mark Twain : a life / Ron Powers.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Powers, Ron.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Twain, Mark, 1835-1910.

Twain, Mark.

Authors, American--19th century--Biography.

Authors, American.

Humorists, American--19th century--Biography.

Humorists, American.

Journalists--United States--Biography.

Journalists.

United States.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

xi, 722 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Free Press, [2005]

Summary:

Mark Twain founded the Ameican voice. His works are a living national treasury: taught, quoted, and reprinted more than those of any writer except Shakespeare. His awestruck contemporaries saw him as the representative figure of his times, and his influence has deeply flavored the 20th and 21st centuries. Yet somehow, beneath the vast flowing river of literature that he left behind-books, sketches, speeches, not to mention the thousands of letters to his friends and his remarkable entries in private journals-the man who became Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, has receded from view, leaving us with only faint and often trivialized remnants of his towering personality.

In Mark Twain, Ron Powers consummates years of thought and research with a tour de force on the life of our culture's founding father, re-creating the 19th century's vital landscapes and tumultuous events while restoring the human being at their center. He offers Sam Clemens as he lived, breathed, and wrote-drawing heavily on the preserved view-points of the people who knew him best (especially the great William Dean Howells, his most admiring friend and literary co-conspirator), and on the annals of the American 19th century that he helped shape. Powers's prose rivals Mark Twain's own in its blend of humor, telling detail, and flights of lyricism. With the assistance of the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley, he has been able to draw on thousands of letters and notebook entries, many only recently discovered.

It is hard to imagine a life that encompassed more of its times. Sam Clemens left his frontier boyhood in Missouri for a life on the Mississippi during the golden age of steamboats. He skirted the western theater of the Civil War before taking off for an uproarious drunken newspaper career in the Nevada of the Wild West. As his fame as a humorist and lecturer spread around the country, he took the East Coast by storm, witnessing the extremes of wealth and poverty of New York City and the Gilded Age (which he named). He traveled to Europe on the first American pleasure cruise and revitalized the prim genre of travel writing. He wooed and won his lifelong devoted wife, yet quietly pined for the girl who was his first crush and whom he would re-encounter many decades later. He invented and invested in get-rich-quick schemes. He became the toast of Europe and a celebrity who toured the globe. His comments on everything he saw, many published here for the first time, are priceless.

The man who emerges in Powers's brilliant telling is both the magnetic, acerbic, and hilarious Mark Twain of myth and a devoted friend, husband, and father; a whirlwind of optimism and restless energy; and above all, a wide-eared and wide-eyed observer who absorbed every sight and sound, and poured it into his characters, plots, jokes, businesses, and life. Mark Twain left us our greatest voice. Samuel Clemens left us one of our most full and American of lives.

Contents:

"Something at once awful and sublime" (1835-39)

"The white town, drowsing..." (1839)

Of words and the word (1840-42)

The Hannibal decade (1843-53)

Apprentice (1848-51)

Rambler (1852-53)

"So far from home..." (1853-56)

The language of water (1856-58)

Ranger (1858-61)

Washoe (1861-62)

A journalistic counterculture (1862-63)

"Mark Twain-more of him" (1863)

Code Duello (1863-64)

A villainous backwoods, sketch (1864-65)

"...and I began to talk" (1865-66)

On the road (1866-67)

Back East (1867)

"move-move-Move!" (1867)

Pilgrims and sinners (1867)

In the thrall of mother bear (October 1867-New Year's Day 1868)

"A work humorously inclined..." (February-July 1868)

The girl in the miniature (July 1868-October 1868)

American vandal (October-December 1868)

"Quite worthy of the best" (1869)

Fairyland (1870)

"My hated non de plume..." (1871)

Sociable Jimmy (1871-72)

The lion of London (1872-73)

Gilded (1873-74)

Quarry farm and nook farm (1874-75)

The man in the moon (1875)

"It befell yt one did breake wind..." (1876)

God's fool (1877)

Abroad again (1878-79)

"A personal hatred for humbug" (1880)

"A powerful good time" (1881-82)

"All right, then..." (1882-83)

The American novel (1884-85)

Roll over, Lord Byron (1886-87)

"I have fed so full on sorrows ..." (1887-90)

"We are skimming along like paupers..." (1891-June 1893)

Savior (1893-94)

Thunder-stroke (1895-96)

Exile and return (1896-1900)

Sitting in darkness (1900-1905).

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 683-689) and index.

ISBN:

0743248996

OCLC:

60373585

Publisher Number:

9780743248990