Word: twain
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...Many of Twain's books mirror the savage and embittered cynicism that lies on the other side of humor, and all of them are touched with violence and the despair of a man who courted the values of his time and despised himself for doing so. The raft on which Huck Finn and Nigger Jim drift down the river was Twain's own fantasy solution for evading nemesis. It was where he longed...
...disputes Twain's lofty position in literature: he was a true original, unmistakably and incorrigibly American. But critics have endlessly speculated on the astonishing and unfathomable range of a man who could address himself to such disparate subjects as frontier humor (Roughing It), the adventures of youth (Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), chastity (Joan of Arc), obscenity (1601, a privately published Twain excursion into four-letter Tudor conversation), and nihilistic despair (What...
...study of Twain published in 1920 and revised in 1933, Van Wyck Brooks argued that Twain fell short of greatness because he masked his reformer's spirit by writing humorous books-in short, by making a joke of a crusade. Twelve years later, Harvard Critic Bernard De Voto challenged that theory by showing that Twain's very humor was a crusader's weapon. With it, said De Voto, Twain exposed the hypocrisy of a century in which aggrandizement all too often passed under the name of progress. The distinctive virtue of Justin Kaplan's book...
Gloomy Conviction. Twain said that every man, like the moon, has his dark side. Even the lightest of his books is pervaded with that gloomy conviction. He disapproved of his century, his ambitions and himself. In 1866, when he was 31 and a relatively obscure journalist in San Francisco, he put a pistol to his head but could not pull the trigger. "Many times I have been sorry I did not succeed," he said, "but I was never ashamed of having tried...
...could make laughter, but not without opening a wound. "Truth is the most valuable thing we have," Twain wrote. "Let us economize it." "To be good is noble, but to show others how to be good is nobler-and no trouble." "If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between...