Mark Twain
21) Eve's Diary
*Deidre Carmody
The New York Times
Now, in this extraordinary literary uncovering, the original first half of Mark Twain's American masterpiece is available for the first time ever to a general readership. Lost for more than a century, the passages reinstated in this edition reveal a novel even more controversial than the version Twain published in 1885 and provide an invaluable insight into his creative process....
Selected short works of humor and criticism by a revered American master
Beloved by millions, Mark Twain is the quintessential American writer. More than anyone else, his blend of skepticism, caustic wit and sharp prose defines a certain American mythos. While his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is still taught to nearly everyone who attends school and is considered by many to be the Great American Novel, Twain's
...Mark Twain was known as a great American short-story writer as well as novelist and humorist. This collection of eighteen of his best short stories, from the well known to the lesser known, displays his mastery of Western humor and frontier realism. The stories also show how Twain earned his place in American letters as a master writer in the authentic native idiom. He was exuberant and irreverent, but underlying the humor was a vigorous desire
...32) The gilded age
The only book that Mark Twain ever wrote in collaboration with another author, The Gilded Age is a novel that viciously and hilariously satirizes the greed, materialism, and corruption that characterized much of upper-class America in the nineteenth century. The title term—inspired by a line in Shakespeare's King John—has become synonymous with the excess of the era.
"I've struck it!" Mark Twain wrote in a 1904 letter to a friend. "And I will give it away—to you. You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography."
Thus, after dozens of false starts and hundreds of pages, Twain embarked on his "Final (and Right) Plan" for telling the story of his life. His innovative notion—to "talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment"—meant
...I intend that this autobiography shall become a model for all future autobiographies when it is published after my death, and I also intend that it shall be read and admired a good many centuries because of its form and method—a form and method whereby the past and the present are constantly brought face to face, resulting in contrasts which newly fire up the interest all along, like contact of flint with steel. Moreover, this autobiography
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