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Author: Mark Twain
Publisher:
Published: 1992
Total Pages: 1096
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA two-volume set that contains more than 270 speeches, sketches, short stories, maxims, and other writings by Mark Twain.
Author: Joe B. Fulton
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2011
Total Pages: 254
ISBN-13: 0807138045
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSamuel Langhorne Clemens, who later achieved fame as the writer Mark Twain, served as second lieutenant in a Confederate militia, but only for two weeks, leading many to describe his loyalty to the Confederate cause as halfhearted at best. In The Reconstruction of Mark Twain, Joe B. Fulton challenges these long-held assumptions about Twain's advocacy of the Union cause, arguing that Clemens traveled a long and arduous path, moving from pro-slavery, secession, and the Confederacy to pro-union, and racially enlightened. A deft blend of biography, history, and literary studies, this book offers a bold new assessment of the work of one of America's most celebrated writers.
Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Binker North
Published: 1910
Total Pages: 464
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThese Mark Twain speeches will address themselves to the minds and hearts of those who read them, but not with the effect they had with those who heard them; Clemens himself would have said, not with half the effect. I have noted elsewhere how he always held that the actor doubled the value of the author's words; and he was a great actor as well as a great author. In the words of author William Dean Howells: These speeches will address themselves to the minds and hearts of those who read them, but not with the effect they had with those who heard them; Clemens himself would have said, not with half the effect. I have noted elsewhere how he always held that the actor doubled the value of the author's words; and he was a great actor as well as a great author. He was a most consummate actor, with this difference from other actors, that he was the first to know the thoughts and invent the fancies to which his voice and action gave the color of life. Representation is the art of other actors; his art was creative as well as representative; it was nothing at second hand. I never heard Clemens speak when I thought he quite failed; some burst or spurt redeemed him when he seemed flagging short of the goal, and, whoever else was in the running, he came in ahead. His near-failures were the error of a rare trust to the spontaneity in which other speakers confide, or are believed to confide, when they are on their feet. He knew that from the beginning of oratory the orator's spontaneity was for the silence and solitude of the closet where he mused his words to an imagined audience; that this was the use of orators from Demosthenes and Cicero up and down. He studied every word and syllable, and memorized them by a system of mnemonics peculiar to himself, consisting of an arbitrary arrangement of things on a table--knives, forks, salt-cellars; inkstands, pens, boxes, or whatever was at hand--which stood for points and clauses and climaxes, and were at once indelible diction and constant suggestion. He studied every tone and every gesture, and he forecast the result with the real audience from its result with that imagined audience. Therefore, it was beautiful to see him and to hear him; he rejoiced in the pleasure he gave and the blows of surprise which he dea I have been talking of his method and manner; the matter the reader has here before him; and it is good matter, glad, honest, kind, just. W. D. HOWELLS.
Author: Joe B. Fulton
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Published: 2006
Total Pages: 242
ISBN-13: 0814210244
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"I was made in His image," Mark Twain once said, "but have never been mistaken for Him." God may have made Mark Twain in His image, but Twain frequently remade himself by adopting divine personae as part of his literary burlesque. Readers were delighted, rather than fooled, when Twain adopted the image of religious vocation throughout his writing career: Theologian, Missionary, Priest, Preacher, Prophet, Saint, Brother Twain, Holy Samuel, the Bishop of New Jersey, and of course, the Reverend Mark Twain. Joe B. Fulton has not written a study of Samuel Langhorne Clemens's religious beliefs, but rather one about Twain's use of theological form and content in a number of his works-some well-known, others not so widely read. Twain adopted such religious personae to burlesque the religious literary genres associated with those vocations. He wrote catechisms, prophecies, psalms, and creeds, all in the theological tradition, but with a comic twist. Twain even wrote a burlesque life of Christ that has the son of God sporting blue jeans and cowboy boots. With his distinctive comic genius, Twain entered the religious dialogue of his time, employing the genres of belief as his vehicle for criticizing church and society. Twain's burlesques of religious form and content reveal a writer fully engaged with the religious ferment of his day. Works like The Innocents Abroad, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Roughing It, and What Is Man? are the productions of a writer skilled at adopting and adapting established literary and religious forms for his own purposes. Twain is sometimes viewed as a haphazard writer, but in The Reverend Mark Twain, Fulton demonstrates how carefully Twain studied established literary and theological genres to entertain-and criticize-his society. Book jacket.
Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1984-05-31
Total Pages: 1104
ISBN-13: 9780521262200
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Jackson R. Bryer
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2000-08-28
Total Pages: 1120
ISBN-13: 1598532960
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAt the outset of what he called "the greatest, the gaudiest spree in history," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the works that brought him instant fame, mastering the glittering aphoristic prose and keen social observation that would distinguish all his writing. This Library of America volume brings together four volumes that collectively offer the fullest literary expression of one of the most fascinating eras in American life. This Side of Paradise (1920) gave Fitzgerald the early success that defined and haunted him for the rest of his career. Offering in its Princeton chapters the most enduring portrait of college life in American literature, this lyrical novel records the ardent and often confused longings of its hero's struggles to find love and to formulate a philosophy of life. Flappers and Philosophers (1920), a collection of accomplished short stories, includes such classics as "Dalyrimple Goes Wrong," "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," and "The Ice Palace." Fitzgerald continues his dissection of a self-destructive era in his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), as the self-styled aristocrat Anthony Patch and his beautiful wife, Gloria, are cut off from an inheritance and forced to endure the excruciating dwindling of their fortune. Here New York City, playground for the pleasure-loving Patches and brutal mirror of their dissipation, is portrayed more vividly than anywhere else in Fitzgerald's work. Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), his second collection of stories, includes the novella "May Day," featuring interlocking tales of debutantes, soldiers, and socialists brought together in the uncertain aftermath of World War I, and "A Diamond as Big as the Ritz," a fable in which the excesses of the Jazz Age take the hallucinatory form of a palace of unfathomable opulence hidden deep in the Montana Rockies. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Author: Washington Irving
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 1983-11-15
Total Pages: 1198
ISBN-13: 9780940450141
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWashington Irving’s career as a writer began obscurely at age seventeen, when his brother’s newspaper published his series of comic reports on the theater, theater-goers, fashions, balls, courtships, duels, and marriages of his contemporary New York, called Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle, Gent. Written in the persona of an elderly gentleman of the old school, these letters captured his fellow townsmen at play in their most incongruous attitudes of simple sophistication. Irving’s next work, Salmagundi, written in collaboration with his brother William and James Kirke Paulding, and published at irregular intervals in 1805–06, continued this roguish style of satire and burlesque. A History of New York, publicized by an elaborate hoax in the local newspapers concerning the disappearance of the elderly “Diedrich Knickerbocker,” turned out to be a wild and hilarious spoof that combined real New York history with political satire. Quickly reprinted in England, it was admired by Walter Scott and Charles Dickens (who carried his copy in his pocket). In later years, as Irving revised and re-revised his History, he softened his gibes at Thomas Jefferson, the Dutch, and the Yankees of New England; this Library of America volume presents the work in its original, exuberant, robust, and unexpurgated form, giving modern readers a chance to enjoy the version that brought him immediate international acclaim. The Sketch Book contains Irving’s two best-loved stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” It also includes many sketches of English country and city life, as well as nostalgic portraits of vanishing traditions, like the old celebrations of Christmas. A writer of great urbanity and poise, acutely sensitive to the nostalgia of a passing age, Washington Irving was a central figure in America’s emergence on the international scene. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
Author: Erik Redling
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2022-01-19
Total Pages: 712
ISBN-13: 3110587645
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe American short story has always been characterized by exciting aesthetic innovations and an immense range of topics. This handbook offers students and researchers a comprehensive introduction to the multifaceted genre with a special focus on recent developments due to the rise of new media. Part I provides systematic overviews of significant contexts ranging from historical-political backgrounds, short story theories developed by writers, print and digital culture, to current theoretical approaches and canon formation. Part II consists of 35 paired readings of representative short stories by eminent authors, charting major steps in the evolution of the American short story from its beginnings as an art form in the early nineteenth century up to the digital age. The handbook examines historically, methodologically, and theoretically the coming together of the enduring narrative practice of compression and concision in American literature. It offers fresh and original readings relevant to studying the American short story and shows how the genre performs American culture.
Author: Joe Brainard
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2012-03-29
Total Pages: 638
ISBN-13: 1598531778
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDiscover the works of Joe Brainard, whose quirky style earned him a reputation as a “recognizable American phenomenon” and “oddball classicist”—with a foreword by 4321 author Paul Auster (John Ashbery) An artist associated with the New York School of poets, Joe Brainard (1942-1994) was a wonderful writer whose one-of-a-kind autobiographical work I Remember has had a wide and growing influence. It is joined in this major new retrospective with many other pieces that for the first time present the full range of Brainard's writing in all its deadpan wit, madcap inventiveness, self-revealing frankness, and generosity of spirit. The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard gathers intimate journals, jottings, stories, one-liners, comic strips, mini-essays, and short plays, many of them available until now only as expensive rarities, if at all. “Brainard disarms us with the seemingly tossed-off, spontaneous nature of his writing and his stubborn refusal to accede to the pieties of self-importance,” writes Paul Auster in the introduction to this collection. “These little works . . . are not really about anything so much as what it means to be young, that hopeful, anarchic time when all horizons are open to us and the future appears to be without limits.” Assembled by the author’s longtime friend and biographer Ron Padgett and including fourteen previously unpublished works, here is a fresh and affordable way to rediscover a unique American artist.
Author: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2000-08-28
Total Pages: 877
ISBN-13: 188301185X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKNo American writer of the nineteenth century was more universally enjoyed and admired than Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His works were extraordinary bestsellers for their era, achieving fame both here and abroad. Now, for the first time in over twenty-five years, The Library of America offers a full-scale literary portrait of America’s greatest popular poet. Here are the poems that created an American mythology: Evangeline in the forest primeval, Hiawatha by the shores of Gitche Gumee, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, the wreck of the Hesperus, the village blacksmith under the spreading chestnut tree, the strange courtship of Miles Standish, the maiden Priscilla and the hesitant John Alden; verses like “A Psalm of Life” and “The Children’s Hour,” whose phrases and characters have become part of the culture. Here as well, along with the public antislavery poems, are the sparer, darker lyrics—"The Fire of Drift-Wood," “Mezzo Cammin,” “Snow-Flakes,” and many others—that show a more austere aspect of Longfellow’s poetic gift. Erudite and fluent in many languages, Longfellow was endlessly fascinated with the byways of history and the curiosities of legend. As a verse storyteller he had no peer, whether in the great book-length narratives such as Evangeline and The Song of Hiawatha (both included in full) or the stories collected in Tales of a Wayside Inn (reprinted here in a generous selection). His many poems on literary themes, such as his moving homages to Dante and Chaucer, his verse translations from Lope de Vega, Heinrich Heine, and Michelangelo, and his ambitious verse dramas, notably The New England Tragedies (also complete), are remarkable in their range and ambition. As a special feature, this volume restores to print Longfellow’s novel Kavanagh, a study of small-town life and literary ambition that was praised by Emerson as an important contribution to the development of American fiction. A selection of essays rounds out of the volume and provides testimony of Longfellow’s concern with creating an American national literature. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
