Autobiographical Writings (Penguin Classics) - Softcover

Twain, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143106678 ISBN 13: 9780143106678

Verlag: Penguin Classics, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

This new collection of autobiographical pieces offers a fascinating insight into the life and philosophy of Mark Twain, author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and one of America's most celebrated writers.

A must-have for all lovers of Mark Twain, this selection of his autobiographical writings opens a rare window onto the writer's life, particularly his early years. Born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, Samuel Langhorne Clemens first used the pseudonym Mark Twain while a journalist in Nevada in 1863. When his first major book, The Innocents Abroad, appeared six years later, he began what would become one of the most celebrated and influential careers in American letters. Autobiographical Writings will help readers know the author intimately and appreciate why, a century after his death, he remains so vital and appealing.

This edition includes an introduction by R. Kent Rasmussen that summarizes modern scholarship on Twain.

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on 30th November 1835, in Florida, Missouri. In 1853 he left home, earning a living as an itinerant type-setter, and four years later became an apprentice pilot on the Mississippi, a career cut short by the outbreak of the Civil War. For five years, as a prospector and a journalist, Clemens lived in Nevada and California. In February 1863 he first used the pseudonym 'Mark Twain' as the signature to a humorous travel letter. A trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 became the basis of his first major book, The Innocents Abroad (1869). His numerous subsequent books include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Aborad (1880), The Prince and the Pauper (1882), and his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin (1885). He died on 21st April 1910.

R. Kent Rasmussen is the author or editor of six books on Mark Twain and more than a dozen other books. He is best known for his award-winning Mark Twain A to Z (recently revised as the two-volume Critical Companion to Mark Twain) and The Quotable Mark Twain. He holds a doctorate in history from UCLA and currently works as a reference book editor in Southern California.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, Mark Twain spent his youth in Hannibal, Missouri, which forms the setting for his two greatest works, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Trying his hand at printing, typesetting and then gold-mining, the former steam-boat pilot eventually found his calling in journalism and travel writing. Dubbed 'the father of American literature' by William Faulkner, Twain died in 1910 after a colourful life of travelling, bankruptcy and great literary success.

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PENGUIN CLASSICS

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITINGS

SAMUEL LANGHORNE CLEMENS was born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, a village about forty miles southwest of Hannibal, the Mississippi River town that he would later celebrate, writing as Mark Twain. In 1853 he left home to work as an itinerant printer and four years later became a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. With his piloting career cut short by the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, he went west and prospected and worked as a journalist in Nevada and California. In February 1863 he signed the pseudonym “Mark Twain” for the first time in an article for Virginia City’s Territorial Enterprise. His trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 became the basis of his first major book, The Innocents Abroad (1869), which made him famous. Roughing It (1872), his account of experiences in the Far West, was followed by a satirical novel, The Gilded Age (1873), Sketches: New and Old (1875), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (1880), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and his masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). In 1891, he was compelled by mounting expenses to move his family abroad. In 1895–96, he undertook a round-the-world lecture tour to pay off creditors of his bankrupt publishing firm and then remained in Europe until 1900. His fortunes mended, he returned to America and found himself celebrated—not only for heroically pulling himself out of debt but also for his uncompromising stands against injustice and imperialism. He died in his final home in Redding, Connecticut, on April 21, 1910.

R. KENT RASMUSSEN has written and edited eight other books on Mark Twain, including the forthcoming Dear Mark Twain: Letters from His Readers, as well as many books on other subjects. He is best known for his award-winning Mark Twain A to Z (recently revised as the two-volume Critical Companion to Mark Twain) and The Quotable Mark Twain. He holds a doctorate in history from UCLA and recently retired from his job as a reference book editor in Southern California.

MARK TWAIN

Autobiographical
Writings

Edited with an Introduction by
R. KENT RASMUSSEN

PENGUIN BOOKS

Introduction

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the man best known to the world as Mark Twain, is one of the most autobiographical of American writers. His presence can be felt in almost everything he wrote. Overtly or through proxies, he placed himself in most of his essays and nonfiction books and built much of his fiction around his experiences. He was ever his own favorite subject and his thoughts often went back to his own past, so it should not be surprising that he eventually turned to composing autobiography—initially by hand and later by dictation. During the last years of his life, his daily autobiographical dictations* were becoming an obsession. According to his autobiography itself, he told his close friend William Dean Howells, “if I should talk to the stenographer two hours a day for a hundred years, I should still never be able to set down a tenth part of the things which have interested me in my lifetime.” Moreover, his autobiography would not be a mere book but an entire library—and not a small one, either:

if I should live long enough, the set of volumes could not be contained merely in a city, it would require a State, and… there would not be any multi-billionaire alive, perhaps, at any time during its existence who would be able to buy a full set, except on the instalment plan.

In all this, he was, of course, exaggerating. However, he was serious about composing a big autobiography. By the time he died in early 1910, the manuscripts constituting what he regarded as his formal autobiography had grown to nearly one-half million words. He led a long and complex life and had much to tell. Moreover, the history of his attempts to write his autobiography is a long and complex story in itself.

BACKGROUND

Mark Twain’s career as a professional writer commenced during the early 1860s, when he worked as a reporter for Nevada and California newspapers and contributed stories and sketches to literary magazines. By the time he left the Far West at the end of 1866, he had built a modest reputation as a skillful humorist but was still several years away from thinking of himself as an author. That transformation began with the publication in 1869 of The Innocents Abroad, his best-selling account of his travels in Europe and the Holy Land with the Quaker City steamship excursion two years earlier. The travel letters he wrote for newspapers during that trip and the book that grew out of those letters earned him a national reputation. Publication of Roughing It (1872), about his experiences in the Far West during the early 1860s, completed his transformation from journalist to author. His reputation then grew steadily, as he published The Gilded Age (1873), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (1880), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884/1885), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), and other books, along with a steady stream of magazine sketches, short stories, and essays. Meanwhile, he further enhanced his reputation by undertaking a number of extended lecture tours. Even before he reached the age of forty, he had an international reputation and was regarded as an important American author—albeit one who was best known as a humorist.

Mark Twain’s interest in writing autobiography began relatively early. In 1870, for example, he wrote about the disastrous effect of the Tennessee land that his father had bequeathed to his family. It was a subject to which he would return several times more than thirty-five years later. In the meantime, he made fictional use of that part of his family’s history in The Gilded Age, a partly autobiographical novel he coauthored with his Hartford, Connecticut, neighbor Charles Dudley Warner. In 1877, he wrote a brief memoir about the time he spent in Florida, Missouri, as a child. Through the next three decades, he made other attempts at starting an autobiography, but none of them succeeded in holding his interest. The first major breakthrough came in 1904, while he was staying in Florence, Italy, where he had taken his family for the sake of his wife’s health. Using his secretary Isabel Lyon as a scribe, he discovered that he could efficiently dictate his autobiography. Lyon was not a proficient stenographer, but she was an appreciative listener who satisfied Mark Twain’s need for an audience. Raised in a tradition of oral storytelling, he was a natural speaker.

On January 16, 1904, Mark Twain wrote excitedly from Florence to William Dean Howells:

I’ve struck it! And I will give it away—to you. You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography; then you will realize, with a pang, that you might have been doing it all your life if you had only had the luck to think of it. And you will be astonished (& charmed) to see how like talk it is, & how real it sounds, & how well & compactly & sequentially it constructs itself, & what a dewy & breezy & woodsy freshness it has, & what a darling & worshipful absence of the signs of starch, & flatiron, & labor & fuss & the other artificialities!…

Try it, & you will see. But with a long-hand scribe, not with a stenographer. At least not at first. Not until you get your hand in, I should say. There’s a good...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Classics
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0143106678
• ISBN 13: 9780143106678
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 544
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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