Mark Twain (Author), Harriet E. Smith (Editor), Benjamin Griffin (Editor),
Victor Fischer (Editor) Michael B. Frank (Editor), Sharon K. Goetz (Editor),
Leslie Diane Myrick (Editor)

Mark Twain is his own greatest character in this brilliant self-portrait, the
first of three volumes collected by the Mark Twain Project on the centenary of
the author's death. It is published complete and unexpurgated for the first time.
(Twain wanted his more scalding opinions suppressed until long after his death.)
Eschewing chronology and organization, Twain simply meanders from observation to
anecdote and between past and present. There are gorgeous reminiscences from his
youth of landscapes, rural idylls, and Tom Sawyeresque japes; acid-etched profiles
of friends and enemies, from his "fiendish" Florentine landlady to the fatuous and
"grotesque" Rockefellers; a searing polemic on a 1906 American massacre of Filipino
insurgents; a hilarious screed against a hapless editor who dared tweak his prose;
and countless tales of the author's own bamboozlement, unto bankruptcy,
by publishers, business partners, doctors, miscellaneous moochers; he was even
outsmarted by a wild turkey. Laced with Twain's unique blend of humor and vitriol,
the haphazard narrative is engrossing, hugely funny, and deeply revealing of its
author's mind. His is a world where every piety conceals fraud and every arcadia
a trace of violence; he relishes the human comedy and reveres true nobility, yet
as he tolls the bell for friends and family--most tenderly in an elegy for his
daughter Susy, who died in her early 20s of meningitis--he feels that life is
a pointless charade. Twain's memoirs are a pointillist masterpiece from which his
vision of America--half paradise, half swindle--emerges with indelible force.
66 photos and line illus.

Download File Size:1.04 GB

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