Library Of America Mark Twain
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Mark Twain
Prentice Hall is proud to publish the Library of American Biography series, offering ideal reading for introductory and upper-level courses in American history. These concise biographies focus on individuals whose actions and ideas greatly influenced American history and relate the lives of the subjects to the issues and events of their times. Under series editor Mark C. Carnes, the Library of American Biography series is being revised and updated with today's students in mind. All volumes are offered at a lower price, and each new volume includes Study and Discussion Questions, which encourage readers to reflect on the role of the profiled individual in shaping American history. Like the steamboat on which Mark Twain adopted his pen name, the industrial growth that swept America in the latter half of the nineteenth century prompted Americans to react variously with delight, awe, fear, excitement for the future, and nostalgia for a simpler time. David Levy's biography places Mark Twain and his work in the context of sweeping societal changes: westward expansion, the Civil War, American imperialism, the end of slavery and start of a new chapter in race relations, and the advances and excesses of the Gilded Age.
Letters From The Earth
The Creator sat upon the throne, thinking. Behind him stretched the illimitable continent of heaven, steeped in a glory of light and color; before him rose the black night of Space, like a wall. His mighty bulk towered rugged and mountain-like into the zenith, and His divine head blazed there like a distant sun. At His feet stood three colossal figures, diminished to extinction, almost, by contrast -- archangels -- their heads level with His ankle-bone. When the Creator had finished thinking, He said, "I have thought. Behold!" He lifted His hand, and from it burst a fountain-spray of fire, a million stupendous suns, which clove the blackness and soared, away and away and away, diminishing in magnitude and intensity as they pierced the far frontiers of Space, until at last they were but as diamond nailheads sparkling under the domed vast roof of the universe. At the end of an hour the Grand Council was dismissed. They left the Presence impressed and thoughtful, and retired to a private place, where they might talk with freedom. None of the three seemed to want to begin, though all wanted somebody to do it.
The Reverend Mark Twain
Author: Joe B. Fulton
language: en
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Release Date: 2006
"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.