The Autobiography of Mark Twain

Fülszöveg

Here is one of the great autobiographies of the English language, exuberant, wonderfully contemporary in spirit, by a man twice as large as life who-he said so himself-had no trouble remembering everything that had ever happened to him and a lót of things besides. Before Sámuel Clemens became America's foremost man of letters in the late nineteenth century, he was a boy in Hannibal, Missouri, victim of a Presbyterian conscience which tortured him into a promise of reform every night and every morning released him again to the devil and his works; he was a pilot on the Mississippi, a printer and reporter and a sometime miner. The America he knew in the first half of the century was a fit breeding place for his great obstreperous spirit and he has pictured it vividly: the small town on the plains whose saints and sinners later found their ways into the pages of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn; the steamboats and mining camps which fúrnished him with somé of his tallest of tall tales;... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Here is one of the great autobiographies of the English language, exuberant, wonderfully contemporary in spirit, by a man twice as large as life who-he said so himself-had no trouble remembering everything that had ever happened to him and a lót of things besides. Before Sámuel Clemens became America's foremost man of letters in the late nineteenth century, he was a boy in Hannibal, Missouri, victim of a Presbyterian conscience which tortured him into a promise of reform every night and every morning released him again to the devil and his works; he was a pilot on the Mississippi, a printer and reporter and a sometime miner. The America he knew in the first half of the century was a fit breeding place for his great obstreperous spirit and he has pictured it vividly: the small town on the plains whose saints and sinners later found their ways into the pages of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn; the steamboats and mining camps which fúrnished him with somé of his tallest of tall tales; Nevada and California in their gaudy youth, with their lure of gold and adventure. Marriage to Olivia Langdon-and a very happy marriage it was, movingly recorded-might have tamed a less extravagant man. But Mark Twain was not made for taming. Nothing ever happened to him in a small way. His adventures were invariably fraught with drama. Success and failure for him were (Continued on hack flap)
equally spectacular. And so he roared down the years, feuding with publishers, being a sucker for inventors, always learning wisdom at the point of ruin and always relishing the absurd spectacle of humankind, whom he regarded with a blend of vitriol and affection. Mark Twain has summed it up himself, While others toiled he spent ua lifetime of delightful idleness." He lived so vigorously that work was indistinguishable from pleasure, and even his hatéi gave him the utmost joy. The portraits of his contemporaries-Bret Harte, Rudyard Kipling, Róbert Louis Stevenson, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Marié Corelli, William Dean Howells and others -are magnificent and priceless. The present volume, for the first time, draws upon the full body of Mark Twain's autobiographical writing, with events put in proper sequence-so distinguishing it from the earlier autobiographical volumes of utable talkn edited by Albert Bigelow Paine and Bemard DeVoto, wrhich were fragmentary and conformed to no reasonable order. Wherever possible, Mr. Neider has worked from manuscript in the Berkeley library. To the best of the material used in the Paine Autobiography and Mark Twain in Ernplion he has added nearly 40,000 words of text never before published. The result is a magnificent American document, of inestimable value as literature and entertainment and a hasic work among the writings of Mark Twain. 16 pages of photographs, somé of the ni béli eved to be puhíts he d here for the first time. jacket design by rünald clyne Vissza