Word: twain
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...generous helping of 30-weight and detergent thrown in. Down toward the mouth of the Mississippi, the land was formed of sedimentary deposits from farther upriver, rich topsoil blown from the hills of Wyoming into the Missouri, acres of Kansas prairie swallowed by flooding and swept downstream. Mark Twain's characters claimed that a man who drank the water could grow corn in his stomach. You know all this, and yet you are unprepared for the Delta, otherworldly and flat, the best place to grow cotton on this earth, once a hellish jungle, cleared by the backbreaking labor of slaves...
...Twain placed Huck and Jim on the river because the river was time, motion, beauty, baptism and violence, but mainly because one could not see around the bend. Civilizations are formed by bends in the river--the Nile, Congo, Thames, Yangtze--a twist of the land, water and fate that, by making it impossible to see what comes next, raises hopes of the possibility of everything...
Blaine was more vulnerable in other areas of venality. Variously, "The Plumed Knight," or "the Continental Liar from the State of Maine," he had so many profitably shady connections and such an improvisational way with the truth that Mark Twain, who joined the Mugwumps (apostate Republicans supporting Cleveland), allowed that Blaine's skill at lying had overwhelmed him, saying "I don't seem to lie with any heart, lately...
...Faculty and students remembered Marius--who taught classes on such writers as Shakespeare, Twain and Faulkner--as a devoted teacher and "Southern gentleman" who loved writing. He retired from Harvard last year after becoming sick in order to finish his fourth novel...
...which Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish in June, is an Indian family novel that should appeal to anyone with a taste for red-blooded American realism and farce. His narrator, Ram Karan, a corrupt inspector for the New Delhi school system, is a self-pitying moral sloth whom Mark Twain would have recognized in a Missouri minute...