Word: twain
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...responsive audience awaited the successful lecture career on which he immediately embarked; in 1867 he sailed off triumphantly on another journalistic junket to the Mediterranean and Palestine, where he mined the material for his first important book, Innocents Abroad. Twain's Hawaiian letters have previously been issued only in limited editions. Now Professor A. Grove Day of the University of Hawaii has prepared the first edition of the Letters for broader publication. The book offers nothing that is not already known about Hawaii, but it provides a fresh, funny portrait of Mark Twain as a young...
Isles of the Blest. Tall tales of horse trading, Twain found, were the same the world over. For instance, a visiting American, shopping for a matched pair of horses, was led by a Hawaiian native trader to a little stable, unfortunately locked, as the trader's brother had gone to the country with the key. The purchaser examined one horse critically through a window, went around the stable, and examined the other through a window at the other end. The match was perfect, the deal concluded on the spot, and the salesman went off-leaving his client to discover...
After his four-month exploration, Twain forever yearned to return to Hawaii. In 1881, he wrote to a Hawaiian friend that "if the house would only burn down, we would pack up the cubs and fly to the isles of the blest, and shut ourselves up in the healing solitudes of Haleakala and get a good rest; for the mails do not intrude there, nor yet the telephone and the telegraph. And after resting, we would come down the mountain a piece and board with a godly, breech-clouted native, and eat poi and dirt and give thanks to whom...
Bret Harte had many admirers and almost no friends. Mark Twain, who respected Harte's work, called the author a coward, a liar, a swindler, a thief, a snob, a sot, a born loafer and a son of a bitch. When autograph hounds enclosed return postage in their letters, it is said that Harte used the stamps to pay his overdue butcher's bill. He was an instant success at 32, and at his prime was the most popular author the U.S. had ever known. Yet, though he sold everything he wrote and his collected writing fills...
Drifting Dude. At one time or another, Harte partially earned many of the opprobrious epithets that Mark Twain hurled his way. He was quite capable of snubbing friends on the street -and equally capable of showing up just at dinnertime to borrow two quarts of whisky and a room to finish them in while knocking out a short story. "If he ever repaid a loan," grumbled Twain, who was himself touched for several thousand dollars, "the incident failed to pass into history...