Word: twain
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...American classics, and all have been singled out by public schools or libraries-but not for praise. In fact, these distinguished titles all appear on some current list or other of banned books: Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Bernard Malamud's The Fixer, J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, Ralph Ellison's Invisible. Man, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, P.L Travers' Mary Poppins and The American Heritage...
...Gogol's time, three centuries of Ottoman rule had reduced the City of God to a crumbling Levantine village of no more than 15,000 inhabitants (slightly fewer than half of them Jews). "Jerusalem is mournful and dreary and lifeless," Mark Twain wrote in Innocents Abroad. "Everything in it is rotting," said Gustave Flaubert, "the dead dogs in the streets, the religions in the churches." Today, after a turbulent sequence of British, Jordanian and Israeli conquests, after years of sporadic bombings and gunfire, this beautiful and richly diverse city is vibrant with growth and prosperity...
...literary distance was not so great as appeared. Before Rabinovich's own death in New York in 1916, he had become an international figure, acclaimed as the Yiddish Mark Twain...
LITERATURE IS LANGUAGE. Drama is personal contact. Though many times the twain meet nicely, certain books aren't meant to be spoken aloud, certain plays shouldn't be read. Reading a Moliere farce, for example, means condemning your mind to an endless purgatory of Punch-and-Judy beatings and convoluted accusations of cuckoldry. The lines aren't literary. By themselves, they're not even particularly funny. The play works as comedy only by transcending the meaningless quips to reach the lasting humor beneath...
...English at the City University of New York, said that living conditions on New York's lower East Side, home for most of the Jews who immigrated from Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, "shocked" such writers as Henry Adams, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain...