Word: twains
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...Make a Difference. Bel Kaufman knows firsthand how a kid can get lost in a classroom. A granddaughter of Humorist Sholom Aleichem ("the Yiddish Mark Twain"), she was born in Berlin, lived until twelve in Russia, where her father practiced medicine and her mother wrote short stories. Her family then moved to The Bronx, where she was thrown into first grade with six-year-olds and learned English "by osmosis." She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Hunter College, earned an M.A. in 18th century literature from Columbia, taught in every type of New York City high school, from those...
...MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS FROM HAWAII edited by A. Grove Day. 298 pages. Appleton-Century...
...when he toured the Hawaiian Islands, Mark Twain planted a monkeypod tree which lived to a great age and developed to enormous proportions. What he did for the tree he also did for his career. When Twain sailed for Honolulu as a South Pacific correspondent for the powerful, popular Sacramento Union, his literary reputation rested uncertainly on one widely read newspaper story: "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." When he returned to California four months later, his newsy and engaging letters from Hawaii had made him "the best-known honest man on the Pacific Coast...
...generations afterward, Will Rogers twitted in the Twain vein, taking America and Americans to task: "Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with." Soon afterward Fred Allen followed with his own caustic acid. "He was not brought by the stork," Allen once said about a heritage-happy snob. "He was brought by a man from the Audubon Society personally." During the Depression, Allen recommended setting up "a crumb line for midgets." His friendly enemy, Jack Benny, was not far from Twain's platform personality in a radio skit in which...
...Twain had his circuit circus, Allen a large radio audience. But TV has exposed more Americans than ever before to a steady, if often unsatisfactory, diet of humor. It offers dozens of stand-up comics a month (on such as the Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson shows), and some 30 situation comedies every week. As the word fun becomes more and more an adjective, the comic is also spilling over into the commercials; where once the pitchman raved supreme, he now adds a light or whimsical touch to ads-in Buster Keaton's Ford-truck plugs, for example...