The Diaries of Adam and Eve and Other Stories

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Overview

The great American storyteller combines wit and tenderness in this "he said/she said" narrative of life among the first humans. Additional stories include "The $30,000 Bequest," "Was It Heaven? Or Hell?" "Edward Mills and George Benton: A Tale," "The Californian's Tale," and "A Monument to Adam."

Editorial Reviews

Brandon M. Stickney

If Adam could get Eve to stop talking for just one minute, he could appreciate her beauty and fall in love with her. So opens this curious set of intertwined diaries of Earth's first two human inhabitants as "translated" with humor, compassion and understanding by Twain. Written on and off in Twain's last years, the fascinating "Extracts from Adam's Diary" and "Eve's Diary" are combined here as a powerful and tender narrative exploring what it might have been like to be the first person(s) on the planet. Twain captures the silliness of the biblical concept with ease and broadens the story with the pair's dialogue and opinion - something left out by the writers of the Old Testament.
Eve and Adam couldn't be more different. Adam is a lazy lunkhead who's perfectly happy to live and not question anything. Eve, however, is scientific and considers herself "an experiment" placed on Earth by an unknown force. She pursues Adam with vigor, following him around the garden and thwarting his attempts to escape from her. "This new creature (Eve)," Adam relates, "is a good deal in the way. It is always hanging around and following me. I don't like this. I'm not used to company. I wish it would stay with the rest of the animals." She is trouble from the beginning. Eve enthusiastically involves herself in the lives of all the animals, including a talking snake she eagerly befriends. "She talks to it and it talks back. I can finally get some rest," Adam says, relieved. While Adam is away exploring one afternoon, he sees a field of peaceful animals suddenly turn on each other in battles to the death. He knows immediately what Eve has done back in the garden.
Eve contemplates her actions many years later, after the two have established a home and have had children. Their son Abel has died, which has left great a void for Eve, bringing her mind back to the day she sinned. She reflects, "We could not know it was wrong to disobey the command, for the words were strange to us and we did not understand them. We did not know right from wrong-how should we know? To punish us because we did not do as we were told-ah, how can that be justified?" The diaries are accompanied by biographical narration from celebrated newsman Walter Cronkite, who parallels Adam's expressions of love for Eve to Twain's love for his wife, Olivia Langdon. For Adam and Twain the company of both women was an inspiration and a security, just like being in Eden.
—Foreword

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780486460307
Publisher: Dover Publications
Publication date: 6/26/2008
Pages: 96
Sales rank: 359,037
Product dimensions: 5.30 (w) x 8.50 (h) x 0.40 (d)

Meet the Author

Mark Twain

Riverboat pilot, journalist, failed businessman (several times over): Samuel Clemens -- the man behind the figure of “Mark Twain” -- led many lives. But it was in his novels and short stories that he created a voice and an outlook on life that will be forever identified with the American character.

Biography

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri; his family moved to the port town of Hannibal four years later. His father, an unsuccessful farmer, died when Twain was eleven. Soon afterward the boy began working as an apprentice printer, and by age sixteen he was writing newspaper sketches. He left Hannibal at eighteen to work as an itinerant printer in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. From 1857 to 1861 he worked on Mississippi steamboats, advancing from cub pilot to licensed pilot.

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.

1. Also Known As:
  
  Samuel Langhorne Clemens (real name); Sieur Louis de Conte
1. Date of Birth:
  
  November 30, 1835
2. Place of Birth:
  
  Florida, Missouri
1. Date of Death:
  
  April 21, 1910
2. Place of Death:
  
  Redding, Connecticut

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The Diaries of Adam and Eve and Other Stories

Overview

Customers Who Bought This Also Bought

More About This Book

Overview

Related Subjects

Editorial Reviews

Brandon M. Stickney

Product Details

Meet the Author

Mark Twain

Biography

Customer Reviews

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