Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    American Legends: The Life of Mark Twain
    American Legends: The Life of Mark Twain
    American Legends: The Life of Mark Twain
    Ebook33 pages37 minutes

    American Legends: The Life of Mark Twain

    By Charles River Editors

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    While Halley’s Comet lit up Earth’s sky in 1835, America’s biggest literature star was born. Though Samuel Langhorne Clemens toiled in obscurity as a river boat pilot on the Mississippi and to this day remains a name oft forgotten, that young man became famous around the globe under his unforgettable pseudonym, Mark Twain.

    Although Twain spent the first 30 years of his life working odd jobs, his printing background, sharp wit, and humor helped establish him first as a journalist and later an author. His writing career took off in 1865 after his humorous short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was published. Newspapers enamored with his humorous accounts of his travels began hiring him to chronicle his trips through travelogues, such as The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrims' Progress and A Tramp Abroad.

    Twain’s meteoric rise in literature took off in the 1870s with the publications of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Prince and the Pauper, novels that demonstrated Twain’s versatility, with Tom Sawyer capturing the essence of American childhood along the Mississippi and The Prince and the Pauper providing a biting social commentary that displayed Twain’s wit and humor. Those books were followed by Twain’s crowning achievement, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which combined the whimsical adventurousness of Tom Sawyer with social commentary about American culture and its treatment of blacks. Huckleberry Finn is one of America’s best known books and has long been regarded as the first “Great American Novel”

    Twain kept writing at a breakneck pace in order to attempt to remain financially afloat, but the last two decades of his life were personally and professionally trying. Family problems and the deaths of his wife and daughter near the end of his life made him depressed, and he was forced to declare bankruptcy in 1894, despite being one of the most famous authors in the world. Throughout that time, Twain kept writing everything from fictional accounts about Joan of Arc to book reviews and literary criticisms of other authors, even while dictating his own autobiography. When he died in 1910, the day after Halley’s Comet returned, he had finished his life as the man William Faulkner considered "the father of American literature."

    American Legends: The Life of Mark Twain details Twain’s life and career, including all of its famous ups and infamous downs, while also analyzing the literary legacy he left. Along with pictures of Twain and important people, places, and events in his life, you will learn about “the father of American literature” like you never have before, in no time at all.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCharles River Editors
    Release dateAug 11, 2012
    ISBN9781475316261
    American Legends: The Life of Mark Twain

    Read more from Charles River Editors

    Related to American Legends

    Related ebooks

    Biography & Memoir For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Hidden Histories

      Nov 25, 2021

      Edgar Mittelholzer was a Guyanese novelist who should be remembered not just for the quality of his writing, but as the earliest recorded writer from the Caribbean to make his living from the profession. I studied Caribbean literature at university,

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Late Bloomer

      Sep 1, 2023

      “An eccentric woman deserves an eccentric biography.” So writes Willard Spiegelman in this first biography of the poet Amy Clampitt. If there was anything eccentric about the genteel bohemian Amy Clampitt, it was that she was extremely private about

      5 min read

    • Article

      State Of The State 200

      Jul 27, 2021

      State Of The State 200
      21 min read

    • Article

      The Boy That Sings On Duncton Hill

      Mar 25, 2020

      IN 1901, Hilaire Belloc, an ardent Catholic, embarked on a lengthy pilgrimage of faith. Starting near Nancy in southern France, he trekked across the Swiss Alps and headed down into central Italy, through Tuscany and on to the Holy City. He called hi

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Anonymous Bard

      Jun 30, 2020

      The Anonymous Bard
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Secret History of Creative Nonfiction

      Oct 15, 2021

      A common misconception about literary history is that women weren’t writing professionally or significantly before Jane Austen. To talk about women’s historical oppression, Virginia Woolf famously conjured up an imaginary sister for William Shakespea

      8 min read

    • Article

      Those Who Left Us: Select Literary Obituaries of 2019

      Dec 31, 2019

      Death didn’t discriminate in 2019—it took down the acclaimed, the obscure, and a little bit of everything in between. The post Those Who Left Us: Select Literary Obituaries of 2019 appeared first on The Millions.

      10 min read

    • Article

      She Was The Toast Of The World

      Jun 1, 2022

      She Was The Toast Of The World
      8 min read

    • Article

      Finding “A House in Taos”

      Mar 19, 2024

      Finding “A House in Taos”
      9 min read

    • Article

      "WRONG FONT" THOMPSON MEETS THE MONTANA COPPER KING A Down-on-his-luck American Launches A Canadian Boomtown's First Newspaper

      Jun 15, 2023

      In the fall of 1895, the mining camp of Trail Creek Landing was teeming with hopeful prospectors and ragged-trousered industrial workers who had rushed to the British Columbia mining boomtown. They were looking to either strike it rich in the ore-lad

      8 min read

    • Article

      The ‘Female Byron’

      Mar 3, 2019

      The ‘Female Byron’
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Landscape Was His Mistress

      Feb 9, 2022

      IN 1802, John Constable wrote seven observations and resolutions about art. In them, among other things, he pledged to follow Nature, to make ‘unaffected’ pictures, and to avoid ‘common place people’. He also declared that ‘there is no easy way of be

      5 min read

    • Article

      Challenge Your BC Bookshelf

      Jun 4, 2020

      Challenge Your BC Bookshelf
      10 min read

    • Article

      Holding A Mirror Up To Local Stories

      Dec 4, 2018

      Every year we see the publication of more diverse books about British Columbia’s history, reflecting the expectations of readers and the interests of authors and historians. My eyes are drawn to titles on bookstore shelves that amplify underrepresent

      15 min read

    • Article

      10 Best Books Of November: The Monitor's Selections

      Nov 14, 2018

      The best titles to be released this month include a novel about Czarist Russia and a look at the politicians who came to power after the Founding Fathers.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Hidden Histories

      Sep 2, 2021

      In 1904, an accomplished young Krio man from a middle-class family in Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, set sail from the west African coast to London. Aged just 26, his aim was to make his mark on the literary world. Augustus Merriman-Labor had

      3 min read

    • Article

      When the Beasts Spoke: Thoreau and the Sound of America

      Aug 21, 2017

      One of the pleasures of Walls’s Thoreau is seeing how Thoreau’s stubborn refusal to lead an ordinary life turned a bright, but otherwise rather ordinary young man into a great and original artist. The post When the Beasts Spoke: Thoreau and the Soun

      7 min read

    • Article

      Thomas Wolfe Memorial

      Aug 13, 2019

      Thomas Wolfe Memorial
      5 min read

    • Article

      Biography of a Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel

      Feb 1, 2019

      Shields has composed a portrait of the complicated author and the darknesses that drove Williams to write, to overcompensate, to philander, to mansplain. The post Biography of a Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Tom’s Curious Heirs

      Jan 27, 2022

      AMONG THE MOST TREASURED POSSESSIONS in my study, gathering dust but re-read from time to time, are my bound volumes of The Captain magazine. They are a good selection, amounting to about a quarter of the total, of the output of the magazine during i

      8 min read

    • Article

      How The Gold Rush Made Mark Twain

      Apr 16, 2020

      In 1861, after being forced to leave his much-loved job as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi by the outbreak of the American Civil War, and having briefly joined a Confederate militia, 25-year-old Samuel Clemens left Missouri and went west with hi

      1 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for American Legends

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      American Legends - Charles River Editors

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1