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Collected Nonfiction of Mark Twain, Volume 1: Selections from the Autobiography, Letters, Essays, and Speeches; Introduction by Adam Hochschild (Everyman's Library Classics Series, Band 1) - Hardcover

Twain, Mark

 
9781101907702: Collected Nonfiction of Mark Twain, Volume 1: Selections from the Autobiography, Letters, Essays, and Speeches; Introduction by Adam Hochschild (Everyman's Library Classics Series, Band 1)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1101907703 ISBN 13: 9781101907702
Verlag: Everyman's Library, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

The first of two hardcover volumes collecting the major nonfiction by the "father of American literature": more than 150 letters, essays, and speeches selected to showcase the dazzling range of his interests and passions. An Everyman's Library Original.

Whether crossing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans or blazing through Europe and the Americas, Twain turned his trademark wit, candor, and acerbic sarcasm on all his experiences. We can trace his personal evolution through his ambition-filled missives home to Missouri after moving out West to be a fledgling reporter, his raucous stories of navigating a steamboat down the Mississippi, his romantic-turned-elegiac sentiments for his wife, Livy, and, later in life, his darker reflections on the ills of society. Often too outrageous not to be true, Twain’s real-life adventures added to his enduring legend, while his clear-eyed view of humanity has provided an unmatched blend of entertainment and moral integrity for generations of readers.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MARK TWAIN was born in Missouri in 1835 and died in Connecticut in 1910.

ADAM HOCHSCHILD is an acclaimed journalist and award-winning author of eight books, including King Leopold's Ghost, Bury the Chains, and To End All Wars. He teaches narrative writing at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley.

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Introduction by Adam Hochschild

Some great writers lived lives that seem limited to only a small slice of human experience – Proust, Austen, Dickinson – but they saw far and deep nonetheless. The lives of others – Cervantes, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky – far overflowed what they were able to get between the covers of their books. Mark Twain falls among the overflowers. Even the complete array of his work does not begin to contain the breadth, paradox, and tragedies of his life.
It was a large and restless one that stretched from the era when doctors bled their patients to that of the automobile and the airplane, from the boundless freedom of his childhood (read the passage in these pages about skating on the frozen Mississippi under moonlight, as ice floes break up and separate him from land) to crossing the country by stagecoach, sleeping on top of mailbags, to reach California in the aftermath of the Gold Rush. As a young man, he heard Charles Dickens read David Copperfield aloud from a New York stage; as an old one he played miniature golf with Woodrow Wilson. He began as Sam Clemens in the remote riverside town of Hannibal, Missouri; under his pen name of Mark Twain he traveled the world as the most renowned American author of his time, visited or received by princesses and presidents, explorers and emperors, even the admiring Shah of Persia. The young Kipling made a pilgrimage to meet him; Sigmund Freud came to hear him speak. Yet, amid these triumphs, Twain saw his beloved wife and three of his four children die before him.
He denounced the love of money and helped coin the phrase Gilded Age but hobnobbed happily with Andrew Carnegie and other robber barons, vacationed on the 227-foot yacht of one of them, preferred the fanciest of hotels, and lived in a palatial mansion with Tiffany furnishings, a marble-floored entrance hall, and a staff of seven. Hankering badly after still greater wealth, he spent himself deep into debt by investing money, his own and borrowed, in a long string of muddleheaded inventions. The most disastrous was one whose failure could have been predicted by a mechanically-minded teenager: a typesetting machine with eighteen thousand separate parts. Into this hopeless dream the ever-optimistic writer poured the equivalent of well over three million dollars (in early twenty-first-century money). It would take another Twain to get all of this into a novel.
His work, like his life, was of volcanic proportions. It is not without reason that one editor entitled an anthology Mark Twain in Eruption. In addition to the more than thirty books he published during his lifetime, Twain wrote thousands of newspaper articles and left behind some fifty notebooks and six hundred unpublished or unfinished manuscripts. Over his seventy-four years, it is estimated, he wrote at least fifty thousand letters, most of which have long since disappeared. The eruptions never ceased. On April 13, 1897, after working on his travelogue, Following the Equator, he wrote triumphantly in his notebook, “I finished my book today.” Five weeks later came another entry, “Finished the book again. Addition of 30,000 words.”
On top of all this material, Twain left behind, largely unedited, some half million words of recollections about his life. The more famous he became, the more often people pressed him to write his autobiography. But he claimed that all written memoirs were fraudulent; instead he would create the first truly honest one by dictating his, to be published in full only after his death. “If I should talk to the stenographer two hours a day for a hundred years,” he declared, “I should still never be able to set down a tenth part of the things which have interested me.” Between 1906 and 1909, the year before he died, he made a good start on the hundred years, dictating bountifully in 242 sessions.
Rambling from one corner of his life to another, freeassociating, embroidering stories he had once written, mixing fanciful anecdotes, personal experience, and pungent opinions with newspaper clippings and half-finished sketches, Twain’s dictated eruptions most resemble a genre that would not be named for nearly another century: blog posts. This mountain of proto-blogging, sometimes with earlier bits of autobiographical writing mixed in, has been repeatedly reshaped by different editors since his death, depending on whether the compiler wanted to present a non-political, avuncular Twain, an autobiography at manageable length, an all-inclusive colossus, or Twain’s life in chronological sequence rather than in the meandering fashion in which he actually recounted it.
The selections in the first portion of this book, pieces that were published in the North American Review soon after he dictated them, are only a small part of this gargantuan mountain. But they have a claim to being the most authentic part because – after a $30,000 fee persuaded Twain that not all of his autobiography should be posthumous – they are the only shoulder of the mountain that he himself edited and approved for publication.
One of the great literary memoirs this is not. It digresses wildly, drops famous names, has sentimental patches, and assumes (true for readers then, but not necessarily now) that we already know a good deal about his life. It has pages about billiards and bowling. It could use a careful rewrite. Nonetheless, it yields sudden stretches of great eloquence, like shafts of sun falling on that mountainside, as when he describes childhood stays on his uncle’s farm: “I can call back the solemn twilight and mystery of the deep woods, the earthy smells, the faint odors of the wild flowers, the sheen of rain-washed foliage, the rattling clatter of drops when the wind shook the trees . . . the snap-shot glimpses of disturbed wild creatures scurrying through the grass.”
Twain had already mined a high point of his life, his years as a steamboat pilot, for what most of us consider his greatest work of nonfiction, Life on the Mississippi, but one of the fascinations of the dictated autobiography is that we can see in his words some of the sources for his greatest work of fiction, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Not just the boyhood figures who were to some degree the models for Huck, Tom Sawyer, and others, but the spirit of that boyhood: the universe of woods, fields, caves, and islands to be explored in an age without supervised after-school activities; the pervasive acceptance of slavery; the small town where everyone knew everyone else’s business; the great river coursing past, as ceaseless as the flow of life itself. And in his recollections we can also see Twain’s knowledge of the wider world beyond Hannibal: its chicanery, its illusions, and its lust for gain. Without the experience of all this he never could have imagined into being, in his childhood landscape, an outlaw like Huck.
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The letters that form the next part of this volume give us another cross-section of Twain’s life. The selection is again only a small portion of an enormous mass, but the window they provide onto his soul is less mediated and controlled by Twain than the autobiography chapters he saw into print. Through the letters we can feel his thrill at seeing new countries, his enjoyment of his growing fame, and his perpetual grand dreams of making a fortune through a magically successful investment. We see his immense gratitude when his friend the novelist and editor William Dean Howells gives him the greatest gift any writer can give another, which is to mark up a manuscript – in this case The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Twain was startlingly willing to let his wife, Howells, and others prune material out of his writing or select which shorter...

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Verlag
Everyman's Library
Erscheinungsdatum
2016
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1101907703
ISBN 13 
9781101907702
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
984
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Everyman's Library
https://myeverymanslibrary.com

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