Word: twain
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
TRAVELING WITH THE INNOCENTS ABROAD (324 pp.)-Mark Twain-Edited by Daniel Morley McKeithan-University of Oklahoma...
...tourists are snobs of sorts, chiefly two: newness snobs and oldness snobs. Two well-traveled igth century U.S. writing men, Mark Twain and Henry James, stand like archsentinels at these two poles. Twain, the apostle of modernity, prized Italian railroads "more than Italy's hundred galleries of priceless art treasures." Antiquarian Henry James found the restoration of Venice's St. Mark's "crude" and "monstrous," even though the basilica might otherwise have crumbled about the pigeons in the Piazza San Marco.*This conflict adds a fillip to two thoroughly engaging travel books that should please the chairborne...
Traveling with the Innocents Abroad is actually a highly unscrubbed first draft of Twain's The Innocents Abroad, the most popular travel book ever written by an American. As special correspondent for San Francisco's Daily Alta California, the 31-year-old Twain was dispatched on "The Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion" of 1867. The excursionists were a sobersided group of about 75, "chiefly composed of rusty old bachelors," bound first for Europe and then the Holy Land. Twain's task was to write dispatches on the pilgrims' progress. This is the first time "those wretched...
...more exciting to them is a planned visit to the home of one of their favorite Americans, Mark Twain, in Hannibal, Mo. So taken was Goriaev by Huckleberry Finn's adventures on the Mississippi that he ran away from home at the age of eleven and briefly floated down the Dnieper on a raft. Goriaev, who has drawn the Statue of Liberty wearing policeman's boots and carrying a club marked Racism and Segregation, illustrated Russian editions of both Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer...
Mulder and Mortensen have also garnered brief accounts of Mormonism from a lineup of 19th century notables: Horace Greeley, Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson (who called Mormonism an "after-clap of Puritanism"), John Greenleaf Whittier, and Mark Twain. The latter's revulsion at the concept of polygamy melted at his first sight of the "poor, ungainly and pathetically 'homely' creatures" that were the Mormon wives. "No," Twain wrote, "--the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure--and the man that marries...