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Product Identifiers
PublisherFree Press
ISBN-100743248996
ISBN-139780743248990
eBay Product ID (ePID)44478417
Product Key Features
Book TitleMark Twain : Alife
Number of Pages736 Pages
LanguageEnglish
Publication Year2005
TopicEditors, Journalists, Publishers, General, Literary, American / General, United States / General
IllustratorYes
GenreLiterary Criticism, Biography & Autobiography, History
AuthorRon Powers
FormatHardcover
Dimensions
Item Height1.2 in
Item Weight38.2 Oz
Item Length9.2 in
Item Width6.2 in
Additional Product Features
Intended AudienceTrade
LCCN2005-048816
Reviews"The story of Twain's life is the story of a nation itself, and it has never been told more vividly."-- Jay Parini, author of Robert Frost: A Life, "You can almost see the old boy slouching around in here, hear him talk and catch him thinking. Powers has taken on the most interesting American and fleshed him out and freshened him up considerably, in the context of his day and from the perspective of ours. If you care about Mark Twain, you'll want to read this book."-- Roy Blount, Jr., author of Roy Blount's Book of Southern Humor, "No one understands the complicated American the world knows as Mark Twain better than Ron Powers. Finally, we have scholarship and writing worthy of the man. Powers's prose is insightful, elegant, and gets to the center of Twain's life, humor, tragedy, and outrage."-- Ken Burns, "I couldn't stop reading this splendid book, and now I can't stop thinking about it. Ron Powers has raised Mark Twain from the grave, stolen him away from the culture-warriors, and reinstated him as the tribal chief of American letters. The book is a haunted postbellum mansion, full of echoing laughter and pain. The vigor and beauty of Powers's prose sometimes rival Twain's own, and his story overflows with new details and arresting insights. Surely this is one of the great American biographies."-- James Tobin, author of To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight, "Ron Powers seems to penetrate the space where Mark Twain lived and is walking just behind him, day-by-day and sometimes hour-by-hour. His eye cocked for truth, he plunges into the interior of the human being behind the Mark Twain trademark: the boy, the man, the mythic American. He gives us the steady progress of Twain's intensely personal existence, the human side of Twain's victories and failures. With lightning-bolt images Powers illuminates the explosive strength of America's homegrown literary voice."-- Hal Holbrook, actor and star of Mark Twain Tonight
Dewey Edition22
Dewey Decimal818/.409 B
SynopsisMark Twain founded the American voice. His works are a living national treasury: taught, quoted, and reprinted more than those of any writer except Shakespeare. His awestruck contemporaries saw him as the representative figure of his times, and his influence has deeply flavoured the 20th and 21st centuries. Yet somehow, beneath the vast flowing river of literature that he left behind - books, sketches, speeches, not to mention the thousands of letters to his friends and his remarkable entries in private journals - the man who became Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, has receded from view.It is hard to imagine a life that encompassed more of its times. Sam Clemens left his frontier boyhood in Missouri for a life on the Mississippi during the golden age of steamboats. He skirted the western theater of the Civil War before taking off for an uproariously drunken newspaper career in the Nevada of the Wild West. As his fame as a humorist and lecturer spread, witnessing the extremes of wealth and poverty of New York City and the Gilded Age (which he named). He travelled to Europe on the first American pleasure cruise and revitalized the prim genre of travel writing. He wooed and won his lifelong devoted wife, yet quietly pined for the girl who was his first crush and whom he would re-encounter many decades later. He invented and invested in get-rich-quick schemes. He became the toast of Europe and a celebrity who toured the globe. His comments on everything he saw, many published here for the first time, are priceless. The man who emerges in Powers'brilliant telling is both the magnetic, acerbic, and hilarious Mark Twain of myth and a devoted friend, husband, and father; a whirlwind of optimism and restless energy; and above all, a wide-eared and wide-eyed observer who absorbed every sight and sound, and poured it into his characters, plots, jokes, businesses, and life. Mark Twain offers an unrivalled insight into the life of one of America's greatest writers whose culteral influence was seminal in the creation of modern America.
LC Classification NumberPS1331.P69 2005
Bewertungen und Rezensionen
Relevanteste Rezensionen
- 17. Sep. 2024
Best Mark Twain Biography
This is the best biography of Mark Twain that has ever been written. Ron Powers manages to tell Twain's life story in his own style and humor.Bestätigter Kauf: JaArtikelzustand: Gebraucht
- 03. Jun. 2024
Timely, cheap and just what I ordered. Thanks.
Timely, cheap and just what I ordered. Thanks.Bestätigter Kauf: JaArtikelzustand: Gebraucht
