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Mark Twain's Letters - Volume 6 (1907-1910)
Mark Twain's Letters - Volume 6 (1907-1910)
Mark Twain's Letters - Volume 6 (1907-1910)
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Mark Twain's Letters - Volume 6 (1907-1910)

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Mark Twain's Letters - Volume 6 (1907-1910) by Mark Twain

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LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 1, 2019
ISBN9783742930897
Mark Twain's Letters - Volume 6 (1907-1910)
Author

Mark Twain

Mark Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens (1835 1910), was the celebrated author of several novels, including two major classics of American literature: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was also a riverboat pilot, journalist, lecturer, entrepreneur and inventor.Early LifeTwain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the tiny village of Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, the sixth child of John and Jane Clemens. When he was 4 years old, his family moved to nearby Hannibal, a bustling river town of 1,000 people. John Clemens worked as a storekeeper, lawyer, judge and land speculator, dreaming of wealth but never achieving it, sometimes finding it hard to feed his family. He was an unsmiling fellow; according to one legend, young Sam never saw his father laugh. His mother, by contrast, was a fun-loving, tenderhearted homemaker who whiled away many a winter's night for her family by telling stories. She became head of the household in 1847 when John died unexpectedly. The Clemens family "now became almost destitute," wrote biographer Everett Emerson, and was forced into years of economic struggle a fact that would shape the career of Twain.Twain in HannibalTwain stayed in Hannibal until age 17. The town, situated on the Mississippi River, was in many ways a splendid place to grow up. Steamboats arrived there three times a day, tooting their whistles; circuses, minstrel shows and revivalists paid visits; a decent library was available; and tradesmen such as blacksmiths and tanners practiced their entertaining crafts for all to see.However, violence was commonplace, and young Twain witnessed much death: When he was nine years old, he saw a local man murder a cattle rancher, and at 10 he watched an enslaved person die after a white overseer struck him with a piece of iron.Hannibal inspired several of Twain's fictional locales, including "St. Petersburg" in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. These imaginary river towns are complex places: sunlit and exuberant on the one hand, but also vipers' nests of cruelty, poverty, drunkenness, loneliness and soul-crushing boredom all parts of Twain's boyhood experience.Sam kept up his schooling until he was about 12 years old, when with his father dead and the family needing a source of income he found employment as an apprentice printer at the Hannibal Courier, which paid him with a meager ration of food. In 1851, at 15, he got a job as a printer and occasional writer and editor at the Hannibal Western Union, a little newspaper owned by his brother, Orion.

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    Mark Twain's Letters - Volume 6 (1907-1910) - Mark Twain

    Titel: Mark Twain's Letters — Volume 6 (1907-1910)

    von Augustus J. Thebaud, Charles Kingsley, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin, Joseph Butler, John D. Barry, William Allan Neilson, Henry Rider Haggard, Rudolf Erich Raspe, Paul Heyse, Carl Russell Fish, Tom Taylor, Margaret Pedler, Homer, John Kendrick Bangs, John Burroughs, Juanita Helm Floyd, Maurice Liber, Anthony Trollope, William Morris, Mark Twain, Charles Dudley Warner

    ISBN 978-3-7429-3089-7

    Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

    Es ist ohne vorherige schriftliche Erlaubnis nicht gestattet, dieses Werk im Ganzen oder in Teilen zu vervielfältigen oder zu veröffentlichen.

    MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS 1907-1910

    VOLUME VI.

    By Mark Twain

    ARRANGED WITH COMMENT

    BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE


    Contents


    XLVI. LETTERS 1907-08. A DEGREE FROM OXFORD. THE NEW HOME AT REDDING.


    To Mr. J. Howard Moore:

    DEAR MR. MOORE, The book has furnished me several days of deep pleasure and satisfaction; it has compelled my gratitude at the same time, since it saves me the labor of stating my own long-cherished opinions and reflections and resentments by doing it lucidly and fervently and irascibly for me.

    There is one thing that always puzzles me: as inheritors of the mentality of our reptile ancestors we have improved the inheritance by a thousand grades; but in the matter of the morals which they left us we have gone backward as many grades. That evolution is strange, and to me unaccountable and unnatural. Necessarily we started equipped with their perfect and blemishless morals; now we are wholly destitute; we have no real, morals, but only artificial ones—morals created and preserved by the forced suppression of natural and hellish instincts. Yet we are dull enough to be vain of them. Certainly we are a sufficiently comical invention, we humans.


    To Mrs. Whitmore, in Hartford:

    DEAR MRS. WHITMORE,—But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me. But even if it angered me such words as

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