Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches

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More About This Book

Overview

These short fiction and prose pieces display the variety of Twain's imaginative invention, his diverse talents, and his extraordinary emotional range. Twain was a master of virtually every prose genre; in fables and stories, speeches and essays, he skilfully adapted, extended or satirized literary conventions, guided only by his unruly imagination. From the comic wit that sparkles in maxims from 'Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar,' to the parodic perfection of 'An Awful - Terrible Medieval Romance,' to the satirical delights of The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It; from the warm nostalgia of 'Early Days' to the bitter, brooding tone of 'The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg' to the anti-imperial vehemence of 'To the Person Sitting in the Darkness' and the poignant grief expressed in 'Death of Jean', Twain emerges in this volume in many guises, all touched by genius.

Mark Twain was a master of virtually every prose genre; in fables and stories, speeches and essays, he skillfully adapted, extended, or satirized literary conventions--guided only by his unruly imagination. These pieces display the variety of Twain's imaginative invention and his extraordinary emotional range.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780140434170
  • Publisher: Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated
  • Publication date: 9/28/1994
  • Pages: 448
  • Sales rank: 632,968
  • Series: Penguin Classics Series
  • Product dimensions: 5.26 (w) x 7.80 (h) x 0.83 (d)

Meet the Author

Mark Twain
Mark Twain

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died at Redding, Connecticut in 1910. In his person and in his pursuits he was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental—and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called “the Lincoln of our literature.”

Tom Quirk is the Catherine Paine Middlebush Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the editor of the Penguin Classics editions of Mark Twain's Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches (1994) and Ambrose Bierce's Tales of Soldiers and Civilians and Other Stories (2000) and co-editor of The Portable American Realism Reader (1997). His other books include Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn (1993), Mark Twain: A Study of the Short Fiction (1997) and Nothing Abstract: Investigations in the American Literary Imagination (2001).

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

Table of Contents

Tales, Speeches, Essays, And Sketches Introduction

Suggestions For Further Reading

A Note On The Texts

Tales, Speeches, Essays, And Sketches

Letter from Carson City (1863)
Washoe.—"Information Wanted" (1864)
Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog (1865)
The Christmas Fireside: The Story of the Bad Little Boy That Bore a Charmed Life (1865)
Barnum's First Speech in Congress (1867)
Cannibalism in the Cars (1868)
An Awful—Terrible Medieval Romance (1870)
The Tomb of Adam from The Innocents Abroad (1869)
Story of the Good Little Boy Who Did Not Prosper (1870)
Map of Paris (1870)
Buck Fanshawe's Funeral from Roughing It (1872)
The Story of the Old Ram from Roughing It (1872)
Life as I Find It (1873)
Sociable Jimmy (1874)
A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It (1874)
An Encounter with an Interviewer (1874)
from Old Times on the Mississippi (1875)
The Boys' Ambition I Want to Be a Cub-Pilot Perplexing Lessons Continued Perplexities The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut (1876)
[Date, 1601] Conversation, as It Was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors (1876)
Whittier Birthday Speech (1877)
A Presidential Candidate (1879)
The Babies, As They Comfort Us in Our Sorrows, Let Us Not Forget Them in Our Festivities (1879)
A Cat Tale (ca. 1880)
Jim Baker's Blue Jay Yarn from A Tramp Abroad (1880)
The Private History of a Campaign That Failed (1885)
Private History of the "Jumping Frog" Story (1894)
Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar from Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)
Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar from Following the Equator (1897)
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899)
My First Lie and How I Got Out of It (1899)
To the Person Sitting in Darkness (1901)
Corn-Pone Opinions (1901)
A Dog's Tale (1903)
Eve Speaks (ca. 1905)
Seventieth Birthday Speech (1905)
Early Days (1907)
Little Bessie (ca. 1908-09)
"The Turning Point of My Life" (1910)
The Death of Jean (1911)

On Writing And Writers
Reply to the Editor of "The Art of Authorship" (1890)
What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us (1895)
Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences (1895)
How to Tell a Story (1895)
William Dean Howells (1906)
My Literary Shipyard (1922)

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