Fadedgiant.net

At Fadedgiant Books

Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography by Geoffrey C. Ward, Dayton Duncan, Ken Burns, Russell Banks

Amazon.com: This is more than a lavishly illustrated companion book to the Mark Twain PBS series. National Book Critics Circle Award winner Geoffrey C. Ward, Dayton Duncan, and Ken Burns have produced a cogent, colorful portrait of the man who forged our national identity in the sentences he spun. Excellent though the brisk narrative may be, the book's greatest pleasures are the extensive Twain quotations; no one has topped his description of the Mississippi River, and he had a salty remark for every occasion (charged an outrageous fee for a boat ride on the Sea of Galilee, he cracked, "Do you wonder now that Christ walked?"). Passages from his correspondence reveal a man of deep feeling; letters to his wife Livy movingly express enduring marital love, and the grief-stricken note following his beloved daughter Susy's sudden death is almost unbearable to read. Excerpts from less well known works like "The War Prayer" highlight Twain's scathing contempt for imperialism and hypocrisy alike. Several freestanding pieces by various admirers (including novelist Russell Banks and actor Hal Holbrook) supplement the authors' text; most notable among them is critic Jocelyn Chadwick's persuasive defense of Twain's frequent use of "The Six-Letter Word" (n----r) in Huckleberry Finn as a necessary and still-shocking device to confront Americans with the moral horror of racism. Gracefully synthesizing current scholarship, this warmhearted biography provides the perfect introduction to Mark Twain. --Wendy Smith

Mark Twain: A Literary Life by Everett Emerson

Boston Book Review, December 1999: Everett Emerson has seemingly read every word written by and about Mark Twain. His biography is prodigiously well-researched and informative. Emerson comfortably handles this extraordinary profusion of incomplete, unpublished, and occasional pieces of Twain himself, as well as the vast output of the academic Twain industry. Much to Emerson's credit, this study is not a mere exercise in hagiography. Where Twain's work is seen as negligible, his opinions ill-judged, or his behavior unexemplary, Emerson forcefully informs his readers. No doubt Twain's life permeated his art and knowing the factual record helps shed light on its fictional recasting, the stated assumption that underlies Mark Twain, A Literary Life.

The Autobiography of Mark Twain by Mark Twain, Charles Neider (Editor)

"Mark Twain's autobiography is a classic of American letters, to be ranked with the autobiographies of Benjamin Franklin and Henry Adams.... It has the marks of greatness in it--style, scope, imagination, laughter, tragedy."--From the Introduction by Charles Neider Mark Twain was a figure larger than fife: massive in talent, eruptive in temperament, unpredictable in his actions. He crafted stories of heroism, adventure, tragedy, and comedy that reflected the changing America of the time, and he tells his own story--which includes sixteen pages of photos--with the same flair he brought to his fiction. Writing this autobiography on his deathbed, Twain vowed to he "free and frank and unembarrassed" in the recounting of his life and his experiences. Twain was more than a match for the expanding America of riverboats, gold rushes, and the vast westward movement, which provided the material for his novels and which served to inspire this beloved and uniquely American autobiography.

The Annotated Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Michael Patrick Hearn (Editor), E. W. Kemble (Illustrator), E.W. Kemble

From Publishers Weekly: Hearn, who edited The Wizard of Oz for Norton's Annotated series, has taken on that formative fiction of American culture, Huckleberry Finn a seemingly transparent work that, as presented in Hearn's exhaustive research, harbors linguistic complexities worthy of an Eliot or a Joyce. In his long introduction, Hearn chronicles Huck's publishing history, from its on-again, off-again composition, to Twain's stormy relationship with his publishers, to the book's embattled trip to the printer (trailing censorious editors in its wake) and its instant success on the market. Hearn offers a thorough cataloguing of the book's critical reception and many controversies, an ample pinch of biography, a lengthy analysis of dialect and a fairly sketchy historical background. The notes themselves (presented alongside the text) are eclectic, sometimes charmingly so: we learn what a huckleberry is, and a sugar-hogshead, and how corn pone is made. Huck's vast repertory of Southern superstitions is carefully glossed, and Hearn wisely includes quotes about the book from Twain (who could scarcely open his mouth without saying something funny) whenever possible. The notes go overboard in their extensive translation of the book's idiomatic speech (readers probably don't need "powwow" defined and can figure out for themselves that "hoss" means horse). On the whole, Hearn supplies interesting information with a light touch possibly too light in the last third of the book, which seems more thinly annotated than the beginning. Restored passages not seen in the original appear in the appendices. Though a stronger anchor in cultural history could have made this volume better, this liberally illustrated and beautifully designed book offers many pleasures for the general reader. (Oct.)Forecast: This is the perfect gift book for all of Huck's fans and should sell very well with the aid of a six-city author tour and national media appearances. Also, in January 2002, a Ken Burns series on Twain will air. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Konemann Classics) by Mark Twain

Amazon.com: A seminal work of American Literature that still commands deep praise and still elicits controversy, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is essential to the understanding of the American soul. The recent discovery of the first half of Twain's manuscript, long thought lost, made front-page news. And this unprecedented edition, which contains for the first time omitted episodes and other variations present in the first half of the handwritten manuscript, as well as facsimile reproductions of thirty manuscript pages, is indispensable to a full understanding of the novel. The changes, deletions, and additions made in the first half of the manuscript indicate that Mark Twain frequently checked his impulse to write an even darker, more confrontational book than the one he finally published.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Children's Classics) by Mark Twain, True W. Williams (Illustrator)

The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature: (in full The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) Novel by Mark Twain, published in 1876. Tom Sawyer, an enduring narrative of youthful escapades, is perhaps Twain's best book for a juvenile audience. The setting is a small Mississippi River town in the 1830s, and the characters are the grownups and the children of the town. The book's nostalgic attitude and its wistful re-creation of pre-Civil War life are humorously spiced by its main character, Tom Sawyer. Rather than the preternaturally "model boy" of Sunday-school stories, Tom is mischievous and irresponsible but goodhearted. Although Thomas Bailey Aldrich's Story of a Bad Boy was published seven years before it, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn changed the course of American writing and gave the first deeply felt vision of boyhood in juvenile literature.

The Quotable Mark Twain: His Essential Aphorisms, Witticisms, & Concise Opinions by Mark Twain, Rasmussen R. Kent, R. Kent Rasmussen (Editor), Shelley Fisher Fishkin

Amazon.com: From the author of the encyclopedic Mark Twain A to Z comes Mark Twain, accident ("the greatest of all the inventors") to Zola ("The manliest man in France"). This is certainly not the first compilation of Twain witticisms. Nor is it the second or third. But of the 1,800-plus quotations included in The Quotable Mark Twain, more than half do not appear in any other collection. This is because the book's editor, R. Kent Rasmussen, is a committed Twain-ophile who has read and reread nearly everything Twain ever wrote. In these pages Rasmussen offers up Twain's trenchant and provocative words on such wide-ranging subjects as fried chicken ("the art cannot be learned north of the line of Mason and Dixon, nor anywhere in Europe"), Hinduism ("It is a good and gentle religion, but inconvenient"), the multiplication table ("that odious and confusing and unvanquishable and unlearnable and shameless invention"), and stealing ("It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected"). A browser's bonanza. --Jane Steinberg