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The 309 letters in this volume, more than half never before published, capture the events in Mark Twain's life in 1872 and 1873 with detailed intimacy. Thoroughly annotated and indexed, they include genealogical charts, transcription of journals, book contracts, photographs, and, of course, all known letters written between 1865 and 1871. This volume is fifth in a series about the renowned author/humorist. 80 illus.
Mark Twain's letters for 1874 and 1875 encompass one of his most productive and rewarding periods as author, husband and father, and man of property. He completed the writing of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published the major collection Sketches, New and Old, became a leading contributor to the Atlantic Monthly, and turned The Gilded Age, the novel he had previously coauthored with Charles Dudley Warner, into one of the most popular comedies of the nineteenth-century American stage. His personal life also was gratifying, unmarred by the family tragedies that had darkened the earlier years of the decade. He and his wife welcomed a second healthy daughter and moved into the showplace home in Hartford, Connecticut, that they occupied happily for the next sixteen years. All of these accomplishments and events are vividly captured, in Mark Twain's inimitable language and with his unmatched humor, in letters to family and friends, among them some of the leading writers of the day. The comprehensive editorial annotation supplies the historical and social context that helps make these letters as fresh and immediate to a modern audience as they were to their original readers. This volume is the sixth in the only complete edition of Mark Twain's letters ever attempted. The 348 letters it contains, many of them never before published, have been meticulously transcribed, either from the original manuscripts (when extant) or from the most reliable sources now available. They have been thoroughly annotated and indexed and are supplemented by genealogical charts, contemporary notices of Mark Twain and his works, and photographs of him, his family, and his friends.
"You ought to see Livy & me, now-a-days—you never saw such a serenely satisfied couple of doves in all your life. I spent Jan 1, 2, 3 & 5 there, & left at 8 last night. With my vile temper & variable moods, it seems an incomprehensible miracle that we two have been right together in the same house half the time for a year & a half, & yet have never had a cross word, or a lover's 'tiff,' or a pouting spell, or a misunderstanding, or the faintest shadow of a jealous suspicion. Now isn't that absolutely wonderful? Could I have had such an experience with any other girl on earth? I am perfectly certain I could not. . . . We are to be married on Feb. 2d." So begins Volume 4 of the letters, with Samuel Clemens anticipating his wedding to Olivia L. Langdon. The 338 letters in this volume document the first two years of a loving marriage that would last more than thirty years. They recount, in Clemens's own inimitable voice, a tumultuous time: a growing international fame, the birth of a sickly first child, and the near-fatal illness of his wife. At the beginning of 1870, fresh from the success of The Innocents Abroad, Clemens is on "the long agony" of a lecture tour and planning to settle in Buffalo as editor of the Express. By the end of 1871, he has moved to Hartford and is again on tour, anticipating the publication of Roughing It and the birth of his second child. The intervening letters show Clemens bursting with literary ideas, business schemes, and inventions, and they show him erupting with frustration, anger, and grief, but more often with dazzling humor and surprising self-revelation. In addition to Roughing It, Clemens wrote some enduringly popular short pieces during this period, but he saved some of his best writing for private letters, many of which are published here for the first time.
"Don't scold me, Livy—let me pay my due homage to your worth; let me honor you above all women; let me love you with a love that knows no doubt, no question—for you are my world, my life, my pride, my all of earth that is worth the having." These are the words of Samuel Clemens in love. Playful and reverential, jubilant and despondent, they are filled with tributes to his fiancée Olivia Langdon and with promises faithfully kept during a thirty-four-year marriage. The 188 superbly edited letters gathered here show Samuel Clemens having few idle moments in 1869. When he was not relentlessly "banged about from town to town" on the lecture circuit or busily revising The Innocents Abroad, the book that would make his reputation, he was writing impassioned letters to Olivia. These letters, the longest he ever wrote, make up the bulk of his correspondence for the year and are filled with his acute wit and dazzling language. This latest volume of Mark Twain's Letters captures Clemens on the verge of becoming the celebrity and family man he craved to be. This volume has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and by a major donation to the Friends of The Bancroft Library from the Pareto Fund.
By redefining Twain's aesthetic, Fulton reinvigorates current debates about what constitutes literary realism."--Jacket.
"A model reference work that can be used with profit and delight by general readers as well as by more advanced students of Twain. Highly recommended." - Library Journal The Routledge Encyclopedia of Mark Twain includes more than 700 alphabetically arranged entries that cover a full variety of topics on this major American writer's life, intellectual milieu, literary career, and achievements. Because so much of Twain's travel narratives, essays, letters, sketches, autobiography, journalism and fiction reflect his personal experience, particular attention is given to the delicate relationship between art and life, between artistic interpretations and their factual source. This comprehensive resource includes information on: Twain’s life and times: the author's childhood in Missouri and apprenticeship as a riverboat pilot, early career as a journalist in the West, world travels, friendships with well-known figures, reading and education, family life and career Complete Works: including novels, travel narratives, short stories, sketches, burlesques, and essays Significant characters, places, and landmarks Recurring concerns, themes or concepts: such as humor, language; race, war, religion, politics, imperialism, art and science Twain’s sources and influences. Useful for students, researchers, librarians and teachers, this volume features a chronology, a special appendix section tracking the poet's genealogy, and a thorough index. Each entry also includes a bibliography for further study.
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title "Mark Twain endures. Readers sense his humanity, enjoy his humor, and appreciate his insights into human nature, even into such painful experiences as embarrassment and humiliation. No matter how remarkable the life of Samuel Clemens was, what matters most is the relationship of Mark Twain the writer and his writings. That is the subject of this book."—from the Preface In Mark Twain, A Literary Life, Everett Emerson revisits one of America's greatest and most popular writers to explore the relationship between the life of the writer and his writings. The assumption throughout is that to see Mark Twain's writings in focus, one must give proper attention to their biographical context. Mark Twain's literary career is fascinating in its strangeness. How could this genius have had so little sense of what he should next do? As a young man, Samuel Clemens's first vocation, that of journeyman printer, took him far from home to the sights of New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, while his next vocation would give him the identity by which we most frequently know him. His choice of "Mark Twain" as a pen name cemented his bond with the river, as did such books as Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn. Then following an unsuccessful try at silver mining, Clemens worked as a newspaperman, humorist, lecturer, but also cultivated an interest in playwriting, politics, and philosophizing. In reporting the author's life, Emerson has endeavored to permit Mark Twain to tell his own story as much as possible, through the use of letters and autobiographical writings, some unpublished. These fascinating glimpses into the life of the writer will be of interest to all who have an abiding affection for Samuel Clemens and his extraordinary legacy.
This first installment of the new multi-volume Mark Twain’s Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading recounts Dr. Alan Gribben’s fascinating 45-year search for surviving volumes from the large library assembled by Twain and his family. That collection of more than 3,000 titles was dispersed through impromptu donations and abrupt public auctions, but over the years nearly a thousand volumes have been recovered. Gribben’s research also encompasses many hundreds of other books, stories, essays, poems, songs, plays, operas, newspapers, and magazines with which Mark Twain was demonstrably familiar. Gribben published the original edition of Mark Twain’s Library in 1980. Hailed by the eminent Twain scholar Louis J. Budd as “a superb job that will last for generations,” the work nevertheless soon went out of print and for three decades has been a hard-to-find item on the rare book market. Meanwhile, over a distinguished career of writing, teaching, and research on Twain, Gribben continued to annotate, revise, and expand the content such that it has become his life’s masterwork. Thoroughly revised, enlarged, and retitled, Mark Twain’s Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading now reappears, to greatly expand our comprehension of the incomparable author’s reading tastes and influences. Volume I traces Twain’s extensive use of public libraries. It identifies Twain’s favorite works, but also reveals his strong dislikes—Chapter 10 is devoted to his “Library of Literary Hogwash,” specimens of atrocious poetry and prose that he delighted in ridiculing. In describing Twain’s habit of annotating his library books, Gribben reveals his methods of detecting forged autographs and marginal notes that have fooled booksellers, collectors, and libraries. The volume’s 25 chapters trace from various perspectives the patterns of Twain’s voracious reading and relate what he read to his own literary outpouring. A “Critical Bibliography” evaluates the numerous scholarly books and articles that have studied Twain’s reading, and an index guides readers to the volume’s diverse subjects. Twain enjoyed cultivating a public image as a largely unread natural talent; on occasion he even denied being acquainted with titles that he had owned, inscribed, and annotated in his own personal library. He convinced many friends and interviewers that he had no appetite for fiction, poetry, drama, or belles-lettres, yet Gribben reveals volumes of evidence to the contrary. He examines this unlettered pose that Twain affected and speculates about the reasons behind it. In reality, whether Twain was memorizing the classic writings of ancient Rome or the more contemporary works of Milton, Byron, Shelley, Dickens, and Tennyson—or, for that matter, quoting from the best-selling fiction and poetry of his day—he exhibited a lifelong hunger to overcome the brevity of his formal education. Several of Gribben’s chapters explore the connections between Twain’s knowledge of authors such as Malory, Shakespeare, Poe, and Browning, and his own literary works, group readings, and family activities. Volumes II and III of Mark Twain’s Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading will be released in 2019 and will deliver an “Annotated Catalog” arranged from A to Z, documenting in detail the staggering scope of Twain’s reading.
In this first book on No. 44 in thirty years, thirteen especially commissioned essays by some of today's most accomplished Twain scholars cover an array of topics, from domesticity and transnationalism to race and religion, and reflect a variety of scholarly and theoretical approaches to the work. This far-reaching collection considers the status of No. 44 within Twain's oeuvre as they offer cogent insights into such broad topics as cross-culturalism, pain and redemption, philosophical paradox, and comparative studies of the "Mysterious Stranger" manuscripts. All of these essays attest to the importance of this late work in Twain's canon, whether considering how Twain's efforts at truth-telling are premeditated and shaped by his own experiences, tracing the biblical and religious influences that resonate in No. 44, or exploring the text's psychological dimensions. Several address its importance as a culminating work in which Twain's seemingly disjointed story lines coalesce in meaningful, albeit not always satisfactory, ways. An afterword by Alan Gribben traces the critical history of the "Mysterious Stranger" manuscripts and the contributions of previous critics. A wide-ranging critical introduction and a comprehensive bibliography on the last century of scholarship bracket the contributions. Close inspection of this multidimensional novel shows how Twain evolved as a self-conscious thinker and humorist--and that he was a more conscious artist throughout his career than has been previously thought. Centenary Reflections deepens our understanding of one of Twain's most misunderstood texts, confirming that the author of No. 44 was a pursuer of an elusive truth that was often as mysterious a stranger as Twain himself.