Publisher Description
There's no one quite like Mark Twain for poking irreverent fun at everything - and he's at it again with this collection of essays, speeches, letters, and personal accounts. Twain begins, in Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses, by listing 18 of them and going on to debunk the Pathfinder's woodsmanship. Punch-Brother-Punch recounts how a memorable jingle nearly drives the author over the edge, and in An Author's Soldiering, we learn how Twain saved the Union. Also included are The Art of Authorship, First Interview with Artemus Ward, To the California Pioneers, The Great Landslide Case, Political Economy, Experience of the McWilliamses with Membranous Croup, and The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm.
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About Mark Twain
Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel L. Clemens (1835–1910), was born in Florida, Missouri, and grew up in Hannibal on the west bank of the Mississippi River. He attended school briefly and then at age thirteen became a full-time apprentice to a local printer. When his older brother Orion established the Hannibal Journal, Samuel became a compositor for that paper and then, for a time, an itinerant printer. With a commission to write comic travel letters, he traveled down the Mississippi. Smitten with the riverboat life, he signed on as an apprentice to a steamboat pilot. After 1859, he became a licensed pilot, but two years later the Civil War put an end to the steam-boat traffic.
In 1861, he and his brother traveled to the Nevada Territory where Samuel became a writer for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, and there, on February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous account with the pseudonym Mark Twain. The name was a river man’s term for water “two fathoms deep” and thus just barely safe for navigation.
In 1870 Twain married and moved with his wife to Hartford, Connecticut. He became a highly successful lecturer in the United States and England, and he continued to write.