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After river shipping was interrupted by the Civil War, Twain headed west with his brother Orion, who had been appointed secretary to the Nevada Territory. Settling in Carson City, he tried his luck at prospecting and wrote humorous pieces for a range of newspapers. Around this time he first began using the pseudonym Mark Twain, derived from a riverboat term. Relocating to San Francisco, he became a regular newspaper correspondent and a contributor to the literary magazine the Golden Era. He made a five-month journey to Hawaii in 1866 and the following year traveled to Europe to report on the first organized tourist cruise. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867) consolidated his growing reputation as humorist and lecturer.
After his marriage to Livy Langdon, Twain settled first in Buffalo, New York, and then for two decades in Hartford, Connecticut. His European sketches were expanded into The Innocents Abroad (1869), followed by Roughing It (1872), an account of his Western adventures; both were enormously successful. Twain's literary triumphs were offset by often ill-advised business dealings (he sank thousands of dollars, for instance, in a failed attempt to develop a new kind of typesetting machine, and thousands more into his own ultimately unsuccessful publishing house) and unrestrained spending that left him in frequent financial difficulty, a pattern that was to persist throughout his life.
Following The Gilded Age (1873), written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, Twain began a literary exploration of his childhood memories of the Mississippi, resulting in a trio of masterpieces --The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and finally The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), on which he had been working for nearly a decade. Another vein, of historical romance, found expression in The Prince and the Pauper (1882), the satirical A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), while he continued to draw on his travel experiences in A Tramp Abroad (1880) and Following the Equator (1897). His close associates in these years included William Dean Howells, Bret Harte, and George Washington Cable, as well as the dying Ulysses S. Grant, whom Twain encouraged to complete his memoirs, published by Twain's publishing company in 1885.
For most of the 1890s Twain lived in Europe, as his life took a darker turn with the death of his daughter Susy in 1896 and the worsening illness of his daughter Jean. The tone of Twain's writing also turned progressively more bitter. The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), a detective story hinging on the consequences of slavery, was followed by powerful anti-imperialist and anticolonial statements such as 'To the Person Sitting in Darkness' (1901), 'The War Prayer' (1905), and 'King Leopold's Soliloquy' (1905), and by the pessimistic sketches collected in the privately published What Is Man? (1906). The unfinished novel The Mysterious Stranger was perhaps the most uncompromisingly dark of all Twain's later works. In his last years, his financial troubles finally resolved, Twain settled near Redding, Connecticut, and died in his mansion, Stormfield, on April 21, 1910.
Author biography courtesy of Random House, Inc.
JAustenSS
Posted April 9, 2012
I absolutely love the B&N leatherbound classics! And this is a great addition to my library. The titles that are included for anyone wondering are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and Pudd'nhead Wilson. Again a great addition to the B&N classics.
5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.B&N is coming out with some lovely new titles for their collection, and this is really, really classy. I adore it. It not only looks beautiful in my library, but includes some of my favorite works by one of the wittiest authors of American Literature. Although it was a bold choice, I do like that they used a reproduction of work dating so far back; it adds a flavor to the collection that wouldn't be there if it was simply the titles themselves.
4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.GeneticBlue
Posted April 10, 2013
Beautiful edition with some of Twain's best work. A must-have for any fan or collector.
1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.melman555
Posted November 29, 2012
I Also Recommend:
The story basically follows the adventures of young Huckleberry Finn and a runaway slave named Jim. Huck is trying to escape has drunken and abusive father, while Jim is trying to escape slavery. Jim is trying to escape being sold down the river, or else he would be separated from his family. There is a moral to this book as Huck slowly learns to love Jim as a friend and not think of the color of his skin. Earlier in the novel Huck is worried about helping a runaway slave and is not sure what he should do. Huck being raised in Missouri, he has been taught that helping a slave run away is one of the worst sins imaginable and that blacks are pretty much worthless except as slaves and property. It takes a while for the truth to come to Huck but he finds that he is determined to help his friend get his freedom, no matter what. Huck ends up risking his own life to do just that. He not only saves Jim, but his own soul too. I didn’t like how the book was very challenging for me to read because of the grammar structure but, it makes the story a lot better and is a pure joy to read and I suggest you read. Just let the story flow and enjoy each word. The dialects used may slow you down a bit at first but they add so much to the meaning to the book. This is a wonderful story.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted March 12, 2012
What other novels are included in this edition??
0 out of 15 people found this review helpful.
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