Word: twain
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Sure to provoke a row when it comes out next month is Letters from the Earth, containing hitherto unpublished, antireligious essays by Humorist Mark Twain. In the guise of Satan writing to the Archangels Gabriel and Michael, Twain pictures man as the foolish and conceited victim of his own preposterous religious beliefs. Coming from manuscripts dated in the last few years before Twain's death in 1910, the book was pieced together by the late Bernard DeVoto in 1939. But the content so disturbed Twain's Christian Scientist daughter, Mrs. Clara Clemens Samossoud, now 88, that she refused...
...Richard Poirier (still here, thank goodness), who must rank high on anybody's list of people with important things to say, demonstrates, in a paper on Twain and Austen a critical method he has been exploring for some time (and in which he will give a course next year), that of comparing European and American authors in an effort to understand the differences between the two societies and their literature. His is a difficult and not always clear argument, but those who follow it to the end of its considerable length will be amply rewarded...
...wrote a campaign biography of Lincoln, and was given the consulship at Venice as a reward. When he returned, he became editor of the Atlantic and settled in Boston, where no one forced him to observe police-court reality and the most severe shock to his sensibilities was Mark Twain's swearing...
...wells went on writing his pale, successful novels and his unsuccessful plays (although George Bernard Shaw saw promise in them), urged people to read Zola and Tolstoy, Frank Norris and Stephen Crane, and wrote an appreciation of Mark Twain that is a good deal better than the piece Twain wrote about him. At the end, when the bright young men he had encouraged had gone far beyond him. he endured patiently the cutting down of his statues. But his eclipse was only temporary. Eventually he came to be acknowledged a great man of letters, if not a great author...
...Reivers, by William Faulkner. In a fresh, comic book, the sage of Yoknapatawpha County matches Mark Twain as a teller of tall stories, laces his narrative with agreeable anecdotes...