Word: twain
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...lugged to shores and mountains, to gather sand and silt and rings where vodka-and-tonic glasses treated them like coasters, and to go unopened. War and Peace, Gravity's Rainbow, Remembrance of Things Past, The Gulag Archipelago: they will all be home soon, reminders of Mark Twain's melancholy observation that a classic is "a book which people praise and don't read...
Prime Bennett titles-The Old Wives' Tale, Clayhanger, These Twain-are among the best realistic English novels. Bennett's angle of view into working people's lives never needed correction. His characters are so authentic that they withstand criticism...
...addition to being a great poet, Robert Frost was the most dazzling performer on the American literary stage since Mark Twain. The impersonation of a mischievous, lovable old sugar maple of a man that he gave while lecturing during the last three decades of his life is still vivid to anyone who came near a college auditorium during that period...
Like the Mississippi, the swindle theme runs deep, wide and muddy through the heart of American literature. Melville navigated the subject on the river boat Fidele, which he filled with assorted rascals for his novel The Confidence Man. It was no coincidence that in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn the shuck and the flim-flam cut across racial and class lines, from Nigger Jim's magical hair ball to the King and the Duke's pretentious ripoffs...
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...