Word: twain
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color (NBC, 7:30-8:30 p.m.). Part three of The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twain's classic...
...Mark Twain wrote the thing in a letter to his minister. The Reverend Joseph Twichell, pastor of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church of Hartford, Conn. (the "Church of the Holy Speculators," as Twain called it, in honor of the wealth of its worshipers), was very much "one of the boys." Unable to carry over into the Gilded Age the intellectual prestige which Horace Bushnell had lent to the Hartford ministry a generation before, Twichell sought the approval of his congregation through demonstrations of manliness, not of mind. He was a forceful speaker and an exuberant athlete, and whenever the males...
...then, only natural that when Twain in the summer of 1876 got the idea for a story in the manner of an Elizabethan Pepys, in which the conversation of Sir Walter Raleigh, Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont and a covey of ladies including the Queen was to be recorded in all the coarseness and candor that Twain liked to believe was typical of aristocratic talk of the period, he should write it out in a letter to Twichell. The good pastor, predictably, laughed his head off. After keeping the letter in his pocket for four years so that he could refer...
...only significant aspect of 1601 is the date of its composition. For it was in the summer of 1876 that Mark Twain's rage against the restrictions of polite English reached its historic climax: he began work on a novel written entirely in the vernacular of an ignorant river waif. Fed up with literary lies, he wanted Huck Finn to speak not like boys in other books, but exactly the way a boy brought up in the tanyards of Hannibal, Missouri, in the 1840's would have spoken. Yet at the very heart of his determination to be true...
...about what has happened to the man of the past. All we can say is that Robert Ardrey has presented a stale if intriguing view of man. He has given us some notion of how much man may still have in common with the monkey that so disappointed Mark Twain's Heavenly Father