Word: twain
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Willy is a man who, in Mark Twain's words, aimed for the palace and got drowned in the sewer. Haunted by the specter of success looming before him, his mind concocts a thousand fool-proof schemes by which the carrot shall be his, while his body stands rooted in paralytic fear lest he should try and fail, or worse yet, succeed, only to taste the paltry fare we call success. Around him is his family, whose empty stomachs have been nurtured on his unsubstantial dreams, and face him now with all the weary pain of the underfed--at once...
...approach, aimed at newsstand buyers of books on the occult, is misleading, for the product, a slim volume entitled The Circus of Dr. Lao, is no tawdry sci-fi thriller. It is instead a blending of the sardonic style of Ambrose Bierce and the homespun hyperbole of Mark Twain...
Other refinements abound. "There's no way in 1974 we could give a black man the precise dialogue Twain gave him," commented co-Scenarist Richard Sherman. "First of all, nobody in the audience would understand him if he used the stereotypical dialogue-'Ah's gwine down de ribah'-so we had to handle the language and the attitude. We had to sustain the dignity of the man." He and his brother Robert proceeded to elevate the slave's image by altering his name (he is Nigger Jim no longer, just plain Jim) and giving...
Huck himself (Jeff East) has been changed into a sort of homespun civil rights worker who comes easily to his vision of the brotherhood of man. "Why, Jim!" he exclaims, looking at the slave's wounded neck. "Your blood's red same as mine!" Twain's Huck, it will be recalled, was a good deal troubled by matters of conscience, and it took him most of the book to wrestle down the acquired prejudices of Southern boyhood. Hardly a doubt stirs this Huck, of course. He is a real nice boy from the very start -maybe just...
Anyone who has puzzled over such things as the mysterious menhirs of Stonehenge or shaken his head at the extravagant ugliness of a modern office building knows that man is unique-and not merely because, as Mark Twain once pointed out, he is the only animal who blushes, or has reason to. Unlike other animals, man leaves behind him not just footprints and skeletons but complex creations-stone and social structures that succeeding generations can reject, use or improve upon...