Publisher Description
A classic short story by Mark Twain, originally broadcast in the 'Afternoon Reading' slot on BBC Radio 4 on 9 November 2010, to accompany the 'Autobiography of Mark Twain' (aired on 'Book of the Week'). Read by Stuart Millligan. This is the first of three of Twain's classic short story broadcasts featuring the McWilliamses, with his familiar trademarks of high farce and droll insight. In 'The McWilliamses and The Burglar Alarm' it becomes apparent that their home would be better off with a state of the art security device - if it works, that is...Read by Stuart Milligan and produced by Duncan Minshull.
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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.
About Stuart Milligan
Stuart Milligan voiced Colonel Stark in the Doctor Who television story “Dreamland,” Anthony Chambers in the
Big Finish Doctor Who audio story “The
Reaping,” Emerson Whytecrag III in “Lurkers at Sunlight’s Edge,” and Garundel
in “Black and White.” He played Richard Nixon in the Doctor Who television stories “The Impossible Astronaut” and “Day
of the Moon.” He also read the AudioGO audiobook Blackout.