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Author: Joseph L. Coulombe Publisher: University of Missouri Press ISBN: 082621956X Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 198
Book Description
In Mark Twain and the American West, Joseph Coulombe explores how Mark Twain deliberately manipulated contemporary conceptions of the American West to create and then modify a public image that eventually won worldwide fame. He establishes the central role of the western region in the development of a persona that not only helped redefine American manhood and literary celebrity in the late nineteenth century, but also produced some of the most complex and challenging writings in the American canon. Coulombe sheds new light on previously underappreciated components of Twain's distinctly western persona. Gathering evidence from contemporary newspapers, letters, literature, and advice manuals, Coulombe shows how Twain's persona in the early 1860s as a hard-drinking, low-living straight-talker was an implicit response to western conventions of manhood. He then traces the author's movement toward a more sophisticated public image, arguing that Twain characterized language and authorship in the same manner that he described western men: direct, bold, physical, even violent. In this way, Twain capitalized upon common images of the West to create himself as a new sort of western outlaw--one who wrote. Coulombe outlines Twain's struggle to find the proper balance between changing cultural attitudes toward male respectability and rebellion and his own shifting perceptions of the East and the West. Focusing on the tension between these goals, Coulombe explores Twain's emergence as the moneyed and masculine man-of-letters, his treatment of American Indians in its relation to his depiction of Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the enigmatic connection of Huck Finn to the natural world, and Twain's profound influence on Willa Cather's western novels. Mark Twain and the American West is sure to generate new interest and discussion about Mark Twain and his influence. By understanding how conventions of the region, conceptions of money and class, and constructions of manhood intersect with the creation of Twain's persona, Coulombe helps us better appreciate the writer's lasting effect on American thought and literature through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.
Author: Joseph L. Coulombe Publisher: University of Missouri Press ISBN: 082621956X Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 198
Book Description
In Mark Twain and the American West, Joseph Coulombe explores how Mark Twain deliberately manipulated contemporary conceptions of the American West to create and then modify a public image that eventually won worldwide fame. He establishes the central role of the western region in the development of a persona that not only helped redefine American manhood and literary celebrity in the late nineteenth century, but also produced some of the most complex and challenging writings in the American canon. Coulombe sheds new light on previously underappreciated components of Twain's distinctly western persona. Gathering evidence from contemporary newspapers, letters, literature, and advice manuals, Coulombe shows how Twain's persona in the early 1860s as a hard-drinking, low-living straight-talker was an implicit response to western conventions of manhood. He then traces the author's movement toward a more sophisticated public image, arguing that Twain characterized language and authorship in the same manner that he described western men: direct, bold, physical, even violent. In this way, Twain capitalized upon common images of the West to create himself as a new sort of western outlaw--one who wrote. Coulombe outlines Twain's struggle to find the proper balance between changing cultural attitudes toward male respectability and rebellion and his own shifting perceptions of the East and the West. Focusing on the tension between these goals, Coulombe explores Twain's emergence as the moneyed and masculine man-of-letters, his treatment of American Indians in its relation to his depiction of Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the enigmatic connection of Huck Finn to the natural world, and Twain's profound influence on Willa Cather's western novels. Mark Twain and the American West is sure to generate new interest and discussion about Mark Twain and his influence. By understanding how conventions of the region, conceptions of money and class, and constructions of manhood intersect with the creation of Twain's persona, Coulombe helps us better appreciate the writer's lasting effect on American thought and literature through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first.
Author: Philip W. Leon Publisher: ISBN: Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
Mark Twain visited West Point at least ten times, delighting the cadets with stories, jokes, and speeches. Fascinated with West Point, Mark Twain mingled with cadets in the barracks, visited classrooms, and observed cavalry and artillery drills and parades. He formed lasting friendships with many cadets, faculty, and Superintendents. Philip W. Leon discusses each visit and traces the influence of West Point on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and other writings. A special chapter explores Mark Twain's response to some incidents of cadet hazing. Presenting archival material such as diaries, memoirs, official records, contemporary newspaper accounts, and previously unpublished correspondence, Leon illuminates the close ties of America's favorite storyteller and its premier military academy.
Author: Sid Fleischman Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 0061344311 Category : Juvenile Nonfiction Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
"Mark Twain was born fully grown, with a cheap cigar clamped between his teeth." So begins Sid Fleischman's ramble-scramble biography of the great American author and wit, who started life in a Missouri village as a barefoot boy named Samuel Clemens. Abandoning a career as a young steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, Sam took a bumpy stagecoach to the Far West. In the gold and silver fields, he expected to get rich quick. Instead, he got poor fast, digging in the wrong places. His stint as a sagebrush newspaperman led to a duel with pistols. Had he not survived, the world would never have heard of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn—or red-headed Mark Twain. Samuel Clemens adopted his pen name in a hotel room in San Francisco and promptly made a jumping frog (and himself) famous. His celebrated novels followed at a leisurely pace; his quips at jet speed. "Don't let schooling interfere with your education," he wrote. Here, in high style, is the story of a wisecracking adventurer who came of age in the untamed West; an ink-stained rebel who surprised himself by becoming the most famous American of his time. Bountifully illustrated.
Author: Roy Jr. Morris Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 9781439101377 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
In the very last paragraph of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the title character gloomily reckons that it’s time “to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.” Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally is trying to “sivilize” him, and Huck Finn can’t stand it—he’s been there before. It’s a decision Huck’s creator already had made, albeit for somewhat different reasons, a quarter of a century earlier. He wasn’t even Mark Twain then, but as Huck might have said, “That ain’t no matter.” With the Civil War spreading across his native Missouri, twenty-five-year-old Samuel Clemens, suddenly out of work as a Mississippi riverboat pilot, gladly accepted his brother Orion’s offer to join him in Nevada Territory, far from the crimsoned battlefields of war. A rollicking, hilarious stagecoach journey across the Great Plains and over the Rocky Mountains was just the beginning of a nearly six-year-long odyssey that took Samuel Clemens from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Hawaii, with lengthy stopovers in Virginia City, Nevada, and San Francisco. By the time it was over, he would find himself reborn as Mark Twain, America’s best-loved, most influential writer. The “trouble,” as he famously promised, had begun. With a pitch-perfect blend of appreciative humor and critical authority, acclaimed literary biographer Roy Morris, Jr., sheds new light on this crucial but still largely unexamined period in Mark Twain’s life. Morris carefully sorts fact from fiction—never an easy task when dealing with Twain—to tell the story of a young genius finding his voice in the ramshackle mining camps, boomtowns, and newspaper offices of the wild and woolly West, while the Civil War rages half a continent away. With the frequent help of Twain’s own words, Morris follows his subject on a winding journey of selfdiscovery filled with high adventure and low comedy, as Clemens/Twain dodges Indians and gunfighters, receives marriage advice from Brigham Young, burns down a mountain with a frying pan, gets claim-jumped by rival miners, narrowly avoids fighting a duel, hikes across the floor of an active volcano, becomes one of the first white men to try the ancient Hawaiian sport of surfing, and writes his first great literary success, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Lighting Out for the Territory is a fascinating, even inspiring, account of how an unemployed riverboat pilot, would-be Confederate guerrilla, failed prospector, neophyte newspaper reporter, and parttime San Francisco aesthete reinvented himself as America’s most famous and beloved writer. It’s a good story, and mostly true—with some stretchers thrown in for good measure.
Author: Tracy Wuster Publisher: University of Missouri Press ISBN: 0826274110 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 504
Book Description
Mark Twain, American Humorist examines the ways that Mark Twain’s reputation developed at home and abroad in the period between 1865 and 1882, years in which he went from a regional humorist to national and international fame. In the late 1860s, Mark Twain became the exemplar of a school of humor that was thought to be uniquely American. As he moved into more respectable venues in the 1870s, especially through the promotion of William Dean Howells in the Atlantic Monthly, Mark Twain muddied the hierarchical distinctions between class-appropriate leisure and burgeoning forms of mass entertainment, between uplifting humor and debased laughter, and between the literature of high culture and the passing whim of the merely popular.
Author: J. D. Stahl Publisher: University of Georgia Press ISBN: 0820341126 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 252
Book Description
Often regarded as the quintessential American author, Mark Twain in fact mined his knowledge and experience of Europe as assiduously as he did his adventures on the Mississippi and in the American West. In this challenging and original study, J. D. Stall looks closely at various Twain works with European settings and traces the manner in which the great writer redefined European notions of class into American concepts of gender, identity, and society. Stahl not only examines such famous writings as The Innocents Abroad, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and the "Mysterious Stranger" manuscripts but also treats a number of neglected works, including 1601, "A Memorable Midnight Experience", and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. In these writings, Stahl shows, Twain utilized the terms and symbols of European society and history to express his deepest concerns involving father–son relationships, the legitimation of parentage, female political and sexual power, the victimization of "good" women, and, ultimately, the desire to bridge or even destroy the barriers between the sexes. The "exoticism" of foreign culture—with its kings and queens, priests, and aristocrats—furnished Twain with some especially potent images of power, authority, and tradition. These images, Stahl argues, were "plastic material in Mark Twain's hands", enabling the writer to explore the uncertainties and ambiguities of gender in America: what it meant to be a man in Victorian America; what Twain thought it meant to be a woman; how men and women did, could, and should relate to each other. Stahl's approach yields a wealth of fresh insights into Twain's work. In discussing The Innocents Abroad, for example, he analyzes the emergence of the "Mark Twain" persona as part of a quest for cultural authority that often took the form of sexual role-playing. He also demonstrates that The Prince and the Pauper, even more strikingly than Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, embodies the writer's central myth of orphaned sons searching for surrogate fathers. His reading of A Connecticut Yankee is a tour de force, uncovering the psychological contradictions in Twain's political aspirations toward democratic equality. Stahl's book is an important contribution to literary scholarship, informed by psychology, gender study, cultural theory, and traditional Twain criticism. It confirms Mark Twain's debt to European culture even as it illuminates his re-envisioning of that culture in his own uniquely American way.
Author: Ben Tarnoff Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0143126962 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 338
Book Description
An extraordinary portrait of a fast-changing America—and the Western writers who gave voice to its emerging identity At once an intimate portrait of an unforgettable group of writers and a history of a cultural revolution in America, The Bohemians reveals how a brief moment on the far western frontier changed our culture forever. Beginning with Mark Twain’s arrival in San Francisco in 1863, this group biography introduces readers to the other young eccentric writers seeking to create a new American voice at the country’s edge—literary golden boy Bret Harte; struggling gay poet Charles Warren Stoddard; and beautiful, haunted Ina Coolbrith, poet and protector of the group. Ben Tarnoff’s elegant, atmospheric history reveals how these four pioneering writers helped spread the Bohemian movement throughout the world, transforming American literature along the way. “Tarnoff’s book sings with the humor and expansiveness of his subjects’ prose, capturing the intoxicating atmosphere of possibility that defined, for a time, America’s frontier.” -- The New Yorker “Rich hauls of historical research, deeply excavated but lightly borne.... Mr. Tarnoff’s ultimate thesis is a strong one, strongly expressed: that together these writers ‘helped pry American literature away from its provincial origins in New England and push it into a broader current’.” -- Wall Street Journal
Author: Steven Frye Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 1107095379 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 293
Book Description
This Companion provides a comprehensive introduction to the literature of the American West, one of the most vibrant and diverse literary traditions.
Author: Stephen Aron Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0199858934 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 161
Book Description
Familiar figures - missionaries, explorers, trappers, traders, prospectors, gunfighters, cowboys, and Indians - appear in these pages. So do renowned individuals such as Daniel Boone, Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, and John Wayne. But their stories contribute to a history of the American West that is longer, larger, and more complicated than we were once told.
Author: Joe B. Fulton Publisher: LSU Press ISBN: 9780807138045 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 256
Book Description
When Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter in April 1861, thousands of patriotic southerners rushed to enlist for the Confederate cause. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who grew up in the border state of Missouri in a slave-holding family, was among them. 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. After all, Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and his numerous speeches celebrating Abraham Lincoln, with their trenchant call for racial justice, inspired his crowning as "the Lincoln of our Literature." 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. Scattered and long-neglected texts written by Clemens before, during, and immediately after the Civil War, Fulton shows, tout pro-southern sentiments critical of abolitionists, free blacks, and the North for failing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. These obscure works reveal the dynamic process that reconstructed Twain in parallel with and response to events on American battlefields and in American politics. Beginning with Clemens's youth in Missouri, Fulton tracks the writer's transformation through the turbulent Civil War years as a southern-leaning reporter in Nevada and San Francisco to his raucous burlesques written while he worked as a Washington correspondent during the impeachment crises of 1867--1868. Fulton concludes with the writer's emergence as the country's satirist-in-chief in the postwar era. By explaining the relationship between the author's early pro-southern writings and his later stance as a champion for racial justice throughout the world, Fulton provides a new perspective on Twain's views and on his deep involvement with Civil War politics. A deft blend of biography, history, and literary studies, The Reconstruction of Mark Twain offers a bold new assessment of the work of one of America's most celebrated writers.
Author: Joseph L. Coulombe
Author: Joseph L. Coulombe
Author: Philip W. Leon
Author: Sid Fleischman
Author: Roy Jr. Morris
Author: Tracy Wuster
Author: J. D. Stahl
Author: Ben Tarnoff
Author: Steven Frye
Author: Stephen Aron
Author: Joe B. Fulton