Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings (LOA #5)

Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings (LOA #5)
Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Library of America
Total Pages: 1190
Release: 1982-11-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780940450073

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This Library of America collection presents Twain's best-known works, including Adventures of Hucklebery Finn, together in one volume for the first time. Tom Sawyer “is simply a hymn,” said its author, “put into prose form to give it a worldly air,” a book where nostalgia is so strong that it dissolves the tensions and perplexities that assert themselves in the later works. Twain began Huckleberry Finn the same year Tom Sawyer was published, but he was unable to complete it for several more. It was during this period of uncertainty that Twain made a pilgrimage to the scenes of his childhood in Hannibal, Missouri, a trip that led eventually to Life on the Mississippi. The river in Twain’s descriptions is a bewitching mixture of beauty and power, seductive calms and treacherous shoals, pleasure and terror, an image of the societies it touches and transports. Each of these works is filled with comic and melodramatic adventure, with horseplay and poetic evocations of scenery, and with characters who have become central to American mythology—not only Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, but also Roxy, the mulatto slave in Puddn’head Wilson, one of the most telling portraits of a woman in American fiction. With each book there is evidence of a growing bafflement and despair, until with Puddn’head Wilson, high jinks and games, far from disguising the terrible cost of slavery, become instead its macabre evidence. Through each of four works, too, runs the Mississippi, the river that T. S. Eliot, echoing Twain, was to call the “strong brown god.” For Twain, the river represented the complex and often contradictory possibilities in his own and his nation’s life. The Mississippi marks the place where civilization, moving west with its comforts and proprieties, discovers and contends with the rough realities, violence, chicaneries, and promise of freedom on the frontier. It is the place, too, where the currents Mark Twain learned to navigate as a pilot—an experience recounted in Life on the Mississippi—move inexorably into the Deep South, so that the innocence of joyful play and boyhood along its shores eventually confronts the grim reality of slavery. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins

Pudd'nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins
Author: Mark Twain
Publisher:
Total Pages: 314
Release: 1922
Genre: Conjoined twins
ISBN:

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This is a story of a sober kind, picturing life in a little town of Missouri, half a century ago. The principal incidents relate to a slave of mixed blood and her almost pure white son, whom she substitutes for her master's baby. The slave by birth grows up in wealth and luxury, but turns out a peculiarly mean scoundrel, and perpetrating a crime, meets with due justice. The science of fingerprints is practically illustrated in detecting the fraud. The title character is the village atheist, whose maxims doubtless express much of the author's own disillusion.

Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings - Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn, Pudd'nhead Wilson (Classic Illustrated Edition)

Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings - Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn, Pudd'nhead Wilson (Classic Illustrated Edition)
Author: Mark Twain
Publisher:
Total Pages: 467
Release: 2019-07-09
Genre:
ISBN: 9781079277012

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* Beautifully illustrated with delightful illustrations from early editions, these are four of the most famous and characteristic of Mark Twain's works in one superb volume.* Through each of them runs the powerful and majestic Mississippi. The river represented for Twain the complex and contradictory possibilities in his own and the nation's life: the place where civilization's comforts meet the violence and promise of freedom of the frontier. It was the place, too, where Twain's youthful innocence confronted the grim reality of slavery. The nostalgic re-creation of childhood in "Tom Sawyer"--"simply a hymn put into prose form to give it a worldly air," said Twain--and the richly anecdotal memoir of his days as a riverboat pilot in "Life on the Mississippi" give way to the realism and often dark comedy of "Huckleberry Finn" and the troubled exploration of slavery in his mystery, "Pudd'nhead Wilson." Together, these four books trace the central trajectory of his life and career, and they can be read as a single masterpiece.* Just as accessible and enjoyable for today's readers as they would have been when first published, the novels are some of the great works of American literature and continue to be widely read throughout the world.* This meticulous edition from Heritage Illustrated Publishing is a faithful reproduction of the original text and is enhanced with images carefully selected by our team of professional editors.

Mississippi Writings

Mississippi Writings
Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1126
Release: 1997-09-01
Genre:
ISBN: 9781579580322

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The best-known works of Mark Twain, in one volume for the first time: Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn, and Pudd'nhead Wilson. Filled with comic and melodramatic adventure, these four books evoke life along the Mississippi River, which for Twain represented the boundary between the comforts of civilization and the rough realities, violence, and potential freedom of the frontier.

Mark Twain--Mississippi Writings

Mark Twain--Mississippi Writings
Author: Mark Twain
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 1982
Genre:
ISBN:

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Mark Twain, Historical Romances book contains four stories: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, & Pudd'nhead Wilson.

Life on the Mississippi

Life on the Mississippi
Author: Mark Twain
Publisher:
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2009-07-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

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?Mark Twain was the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs.? --William Faulkner A brilliant amalgam of remembrance and reportage, by turns satiric, celebratory, nostalgic, and melancholy, Life on the Mississippi evokes the great river that Mark Twain knew as a boy and young man and the one he revisited as a mature and successful author. Written between the publication of his two greatest novels, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Twain?s rich portrait of the Mississippi marks a distinctive transition in the life of the river and the nation, from the boom years preceding the Civil War to the sober times that followed it. Library of America Paperback Classics feature authoritative texts drawn from the acclaimed Library of America series and introduced by today?s most distinguished scholars and writers. Each book features a detailed chronology of the author?s life and career, and essay on the choice of the text, and notes. The contents of this Paperback Classic are drawn from Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings, volume number 5 in the Library of America series. It is joined in the series by six companion volumes, gathering the collected works of Mark Twain.

Old Times on the Mississippi

Old Times on the Mississippi
Author: Mark Twain
Publisher:
Total Pages: 174
Release: 1876
Genre: Mississippi River
ISBN:

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River of Dreams

River of Dreams
Author: Thomas Ruys Smith
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2007-06-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0807143081

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Even in the decades before Mark Twain enthralled the world with his evocative representations of the Mississippi, the river played an essential role in American culture and consciousness. Throughout the antebellum era, the Mississippi acted as a powerful symbol of America's conception of itself -- and the world's conception of America. As Twain understood, "The Mississippi is well worth reading about." Thomas Ruys Smith's River of Dreams is an examination of the Mississippi's role in the antebellum imagination, exploring its cultural position in literature, art, thought, and national life. Presidents, politicians, authors, poets, painters, and international celebrities of every variety experienced the Mississippi in its Golden Age. They left an extraordinary collection of representations of the river in their wake, images that evolved as America itself changed. From Thomas Jefferson's vision for the Mississippi to Andrew Jackson and the rowdy river culture of the early nineteenth century, Smith charts the Mississippi's shifting importance in the making of the nation. He examines the accounts of European travelers, including Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray, whose views of the river were heavily influenced by the world of the steamboat and plantation slavery. Smith discusses the growing importance of visual representations of the Mississippi as the antebellum period progressed, exploring the ways in which views of the river, particularly giant moving panoramas that toured the world, echoed notions of manifest destiny and the westward movement. He evokes the river in the late antebellum years as a place of crime and mystery, especially in popular writing, and most notably in Herman Melville's The Confidence-Man. An epilogue discusses the Mississippi during the Civil War, when possession of the river became vital, symbolically as well as militarily. The epilogue also provides an introduction to Mark Twain, a product of the antebellum river world who was to resurrect its imaginative potential for a post-war nation and produce an iconic Mississippi that still flows through a wide and fertile floodplain in American literature. From empire building in the Louisiana Purchase to the trauma of the Civil War, the Mississippi's dominant symbolic meanings tracked the essential forces operating within the nation. As Smith shows in this groundbreaking work, the story of the imagined Mississippi River is the story of antebellum America itself.

Mark Twain And The South

Mark Twain And The South
Author: Arthur G. Pettit
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2014-07-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813148782

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The South was many things to Mark Twain: boyhood home, testing ground for manhood, and the principal source of creative inspiration. Although he left the South while a young man, seldom to return, it remained for him always a haunting presence, alternately loved and loathed. Mark Twain and the South was the first book on this major yet largely ignored aspect of the private life of Samuel Clemens and one of the major themes in his writing from 1863 until his death. Arthur G. Pettit clearly demonstrates that Mark Twain's feelings on race and region moved in an intelligible direction from the white Southern point of view he was exposed to in his youth to self-censorship, disillusionment, and, ultimately, a deeply pessimistic and sardonic outlook in which the dream of racial brotherhood was forever dead. Approaching his subject as a historian with a deep appreciation for literature, he bases his study on a wide variety of Mark Twain's published and unpublished works, including his notebooks, scrapbooks, and letters. An interesting feature of this illuminating work is an examination of Clemens's relations with the only two black men he knew well in his adult years.

The Mississippi Wrtings of Mark Twain

The Mississippi Wrtings of Mark Twain
Author: Mark Twain
Publisher: State Street Press
Total Pages: 890
Release: 2001
Genre: Mississippi River
ISBN: 9780681979901

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