Publisher Description
A remarkable resemblance of two boys born on the same day in the sixteenth century became the basis of Mark Twain’s first try at historical fiction. He had begun writing the year before on his to-be famous Huckleberry Finn manuscript. However, he became discouraged with that story and decided to either pigeonhole it or maybe even burn it. He had come up with an idea for a play, but instead turned it into the novel you’re about to hear; that of The Prince and the Pauper. This resulted in a fable that was almost a fairy tale, one that became a fine story for young people of all ages.
There were many unjust laws in the 1500s, and Twain delved into them with his usual remarkable insight. The success also led to a resumption of the Finn adventures, thus preserving one of his major accomplishments, one that took about seven years to eventually complete. Listen now to the story of Tom Canty and Edward VI.
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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 John Rayburn
John Rayburn is a veteran of sixty-two years in broadcasting. He served as a news and sports anchor and show host, and his television newscast achieved the largest share-of-audience figures of any major-market television newscast in the nation. He is a member of the Broadcast Pioneers Hall of Fame. His network credits include reports and/or appearances on The Today Show, Huntley-Brinkley News, Walter Cronkite News, NBC Monitor, NBC News on the Hour, and others. He recorded dozens of books for the National Library Service and narrated innumerable radio and television recordings.