Dr. Alan Gribben, a foremost Twain scholar, made waves in 1980 with the publication of Mark Twain's Library, a study that exposed for the first time the breadth of Twain's reading and influences. Prior to Gribben's work, much of Twain's reading history was assumed lost, but through dogged searching Gribben was able to source much of Twain's library. Mark Twain's Literary Resources is a much-expanded examination of Twain's library and readings. Volume I included Gribben's reflections on the work involved in cataloging Twain's reading and analysis of Twain's influences and opinions. This volume, long awaited, is an in-depth and comprehensive accounting of Twain's literary history. Each work read or owned by Twain is listed, along with information pertaining to editions, locations, and more. Gribben also includes scholarly annotations that explain the significance of many works, making this volume of Mark Twain's Literary Resources one of the most important additions to our understanding of America's greatest author.
In 1895 Mark Twain conducted a year-long around-the-world lecture tour that formed the basis for Following the Equator. A modern-day journalist recounts Twain's passage through India and offers his own intriguing observations of the same sites a century later.
Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples is the first book-length study of the writer’s evolving views regarding the aboriginal inhabitants of North America and the Southern Hemisphere, and his deeply conflicted representations of them in fiction, newspaper sketches, and speeches. Using a wide range of archival materials—including previously unexamined marginalia in books from Clemens’s personal library—Driscoll charts the development of the writer’s ethnocentric attitudes about Indians and savagery in relation to the various geographic and social milieus of communities he inhabited at key periods in his life, from antebellum Hannibal, Missouri, and the Sierra Nevada mining camps of the 1860s to the progressive urban enclave of Hartford’s Nook Farm. The book also examines the impact of Clemens’s 1895–96 world lecture tour, when he traveled to Australia and New Zealand and learned firsthand about the dispossession and mistreatment of native peoples under British colonial rule. This groundbreaking work of cultural studies offers fresh readings of canonical texts such as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Roughing It, and Following the Equator, as well as a number of Twain’s shorter works.
This volume collects the most important writings by Mark Twain in which he used biblical settings, themes, and figures. Featuring Twain's singular portrayals of God, Adam, Eve, Satan, Methuselah, Shem, St. Peter, and others, the writings stand among Twain's most imaginative expressions of his views on human nature and humankind's relation to the Creator and the universe. Composed over four decades (1871-1910), the writings range from farce to fantasy to satire, each one bearing the mark of Twain's unmistakable wit and insight. Among the many delights in store for readers are Adam and Eve's divergent accounts of their domestic troubles; Methuselah's discussion of an ancient version of baseball, complete with a parody of baseball jargon; Shem's hand-wringing account of how material shortages and labor troubles were hampering the progress of the ark his father, Noah, was building; a description of the disruptive actions of the fire-and-brimstone evangelist Sam Jones upon arriving in heaven; Captain Stormfield's revelations of what heaven is really like; Satan's musings on our puerile concepts of the afterlife; and Twain's advice on how to dress and tip properly in heaven. Twain's humor, however, is never gratuitous. As readers laugh their way through this volume, they will find ample evidence of Twain's concerns about scriptural fallacies and inconsistencies, the Bible's rather flat portrayal of important characters, and our limited notions about the nature and meaning of our own--and God's--existence. Many of the pieces in this collection, even the most lighthearted, might still be considered controversial; of some of the darker pieces, Twain himself acknowledged that they would be heretical in any age. Moreover, these writings are valuable cultural artifacts of a time when, across the Western world, fundamental religious beliefs were being called into question by the precepts of Darwinism and the rapid advances of science and technology. Several of this volume's selections are previously unpublished; others, like Letters from the Earth, are classics. Virtually all have been newly edited to reflect as closely as possible Twain's final intentions for their form and content. For serious Twain devotees, editors Howard G. Baetzhold and Joseph B. McCullough have supplied an abundance of background material on the writings, including details on the history of their composition, publication, and relevance to the Twain canon.
Following the Equator, A Journey Around the World by Mark Twain, describes the author's experience as he travels around the world. The author, whose real name is Samuel Clemens, is accompanied by his wife and daughter on the thirteen-month trip. Their travels occur in the late eighteen hundreds and they traveled by various means of transportation. Beginning in Paris, where the family is living at the time, they begin by sailing to New York, crossing the American continent, and boarding a ship in Victoria, British Columbia. This is where the story really begins, since Twain has little to say about their experiences on the North American continent. The thirteen-month journey takes them to Hawaii, the Fijis, Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon, Mauritius, Mozambique, and South Africa before they sail to England. The return journey to England takes two weeks. Twain has a variety of experiences as he travels, just as most people do. He describes these experiences in his own rich way with his own brand of wit. He relates the experiences of the various accommodations on ship and shore, complaining about the bedding on the ships and the noise in the hotel halls in India. There are the servants that are constantly in and out of their quarters, the experience of riding in a jinricksha, trains in India and handcarts in the Himalayas. He describes his experiences at the betrothal party of an Indian girl, riding an elephant for the first time, and visiting Molokai, the leper colony in Hawaii. There was shark fishing in Australia and tiger hunting in India, plus diamond mining in South Africa. Like all travelers, Twain enjoyed these experiences.
Examines Mark Twain's writing of Huckleberry Finn, calling into question commonly held interpretations of the work on the subjects of youth, youth culture, and race relations, based on research into the social preoccupations of the era in which it was written.
The family consisted of four persons: Margaret Lester, widow, aged thirty six; Helen Lester, her daughter, aged sixteen; Mrs. LesterÕs maiden aunts, Hannah and Hester Gray, twins, aged sixty-seven. Waking and sleeping, the three women spent their days and night in adoring the young girl; in watching the movements of her sweet spirit in the mirror of her face; in refreshing their souls with the vision of her bloom and beauty; in listening to the music of her voice; in gratefully recognizing how rich and fair for them was the world with this presence in it; in shuddering to think how desolate it would be with this light gone out of it. By natureÑand insideÑthe aged aunts were utterly dear and lovable and good, but in the matter of morals and conduct their training had been so uncompromisingly strict that it had made them exteriorly austere, not to say stern. Their influence was effective in the house; so effective that the mother and the daughter conformed to its moral and religious requirements cheerfully, contentedly, happily, unquestionably. To do this was become second nature to them. And so in this peaceful heaven there were no clashings, no irritations, no fault-finding, no heart-burnings. In it a lie had no place. In it a lie was unthinkable. In it speech was restricted to absolute truth, iron-bound truth, implacable and uncompromising truth, let the resulting consequences be what they might. At last, one day, under stress of circumstances, the darling of the house sullied her lips with a lieÑand confessed it, with tears and self-upbraidings. There are not any words that can paint the consternation of the aunts. It was as if the sky had crumpled up and collapsed and the earth had tumbled to ruin with a crash. They sat side by side, white and stern, gazing speechless upon the culprit, who was on her knees before them with her face buried first in one lap and then the other, moaning and sobbing, and appealing for sympathy and forgiveness and getting no response, humbly kissing the hand of the one, then of the other, only to see it withdrawn as suffering defilement by those soiled lips.
Acquired by the Bodleian Library in 2002, the Book of Curiosities is now recognized as one of the most important discoveries in the history of cartography in recent decades. This eleventh-century Arabic treatise, composed in Egypt under the Fatimid caliphs, is a detailed account of the heavens and the Earth, illustrated by an unparalleled series of maps and astronomical diagrams. With topics ranging from comets to the island of Sicily, from lunar mansions to the sources of the Nile, it represents the extent of geographical, astronomical and astrological knowledge of the time. This authoritative edition and translation, accompanied by a colour facsimile reproduction, opens a unique window onto the worldview of medieval Islam. An extensive glossary of star-names and seven indices, on birds, animals and other items have been added for easy reference.
