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Title: The Singular Mark Twain : A Biography by FRED KAPLAN ISBN: 0-385-47715-5 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 21 October, 2003 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Mark Twain & 19th Century American Culture
Comment: The Singular Mark Twain by Fred Kaplan builds an intimate relationship for readers with the itinerant journalist who became one of America's most prolific authors, most humorous commentators and most entertaining public speakers. Kaplan arranges Twain's experiences, his relationships and his attitudes into a foundation beneath his extraordinary literary output. The result is a fascinating history of 19th century American culture.
Kaplan seeks to establish Twain as the American literary figure who looms above all others. He also shows him as an often irascible curmudgeon who frequently outraged people with whom he found fault. Like many creative giants, Twain didn't suffer fools gladly and employed his talent for sarcasm and satire to skewer self-righteous politicians, remorseless racists, hypocritical churchmen and many others, regardless of their status.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens' childhood in Florida, Missouri and later in Hannibal on the Mississippi River was spent in wild, imaginative play with a multi-ethnic neighborhood of kids all of ages. Sam's father, John Marshall Clemens, was a stern, physically unwell attorney and unlucky land speculator who died when Sam was 11 and of whom he was later to say, "My own knowledge of him amounted to little more than an introduction." His mother smothered frail Sam from infancy with love and helped him fight health problems with homeopathic remedies. Fire and brimstone sermons at Hannibal's Old Ship of Zion church were a regular feature of young Sam's week. In fact, Kaplan says Sam heard a steady litany at church and at home that "Satan was real, and he visited Hannibal often."
Sam spent his childhood summers at his aunt and uncle's farm near Florida where he found subsequent literary inspiration from adventures with his nine cousins and storytelling by his uncle's oldest slave, Uncle Dan'l. "I can see the white and black children grouped on the hearth, with light playing on their faces ... and I can feel again the creepy joy which quivered through me when the time for the ghost story was reached." Back in Hannibal, Sam harvested more memories from a gang of friends like Tom Blankenship who Twain described as "ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he was as good a heart as ever any boy had. His liberties were totally unrestricted ... We liked him; we enjoyed his society. And as his society was forbidden us by our parents ... we sought and got more of his society than of any other boy's."
After his father died, Jane Clemens apprenticed 11-year-old Sam as a printer's devil to the publisher of the Hannibal Gazette to help earn money for the family. His young entry into the labor force undoubtedly affected his character, contributing to his driving ambition, extraordinary productivity and the sarcasm that seasoned much of his writing.
Another local paper, the Hannibal Journal, was offered for sale after many residents left town to escape a yellow fever outbreak and headed for the gold rush in California. Sam's older brother Orion borrowed $500 from a local farmer, bought the paper and hired Sam at $3.50 a week. Sam never saw a penny. The Journal failed after four years, partly because of a poor economy and partly because it wasn't very good. Sam described his brother, his editor and his boss as "full of blessed egotism and placid self-importance ... (who) wrote with impressive flatulence and soaring confidence upon the vastest subjects."
Armed with a concise style and a valise full of satire, Sam spent several years chasing work as a travel writer in St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Keokuk, Iowa, Carson City, Nevada, San Francisco, Hawaii and back in New York. Building fame along the way, Sam continued to harvest themes for subsequent stories. Especially fertile were the ideas Sam hatched from 1857 to 1861 while working as a pilot on Mississippi riverboats between St. Louis and New Orleans and writing articles for the New Orleans Picayune.
Twain shared his weak constitution with Olivia Langdon, daughter of a wealthy Elmira, New York businessman with whose family he stayed on a weekend visit to Elmira in August, 1868. He was smitten with Livy and probably also by her father's wealth. Their February, 1870, marriage sparked the genesis of Mark Twain's most famous work. He recalled telling Livy as a two-day-old bridegroom how "The old life has swept before me like a panorama; the old days have trooped by in their old glory, again; the old faces have looked out of the mists of the past."
From the late 1870s to the early 1890s, Twain came to fancy himself an astute money manager. Amidst that delusion, he dedicated much of his considerable wealth to speculative investments that evaporated in the 1893 depression. Twain's financial losses coincided with his evolution away from any semblance of Christian commitment. His antipathy toward organized religion is reflected in his irritation with George Washington Cable, an anti-slavery New Orleans writer and avowed Christian with whom he partnered on a lecture tour promoting Huckleberry Finn. "Mind you, I like him; he is pleasant company ... but in him & his person I have learned to hate all religions. He has taught me to abhor & detest the Sabbath-day & hunt up new & troublesome ways to dishonor it."
Because his life was so rich in such an exciting era and because so much of his work is autobiographical, Mark Twain is a fascinating character. Along with his intellectual brilliance, prodigious output and skillful self-promotion, Kaplan also shows us many of Twain's human frailties, including his addiction to tobacco, his affinity for Scotch whiskey and his brittle temper. If there is a criticism of Kaplan's work, it occasionally crosses the line between valid interpretation and unnecessary minutiae. In any case, The Singular Mark Twain is a tour de force that weaves Mark Twain's remarkable life and times into his brilliant work. It is a most interesting read.
Rating: 5
Summary: A comprehensive evocation of a much-loved icon
Comment: Fred Kaplan's perceptive and entertaining biography of America's premier writer brings to life not only the familiar Mark Twain the humorist and man of letters, but all of his other manifold aspects (or "selves," as the author liked to call them, perceiving himself as the plural Mark Twain) as well: the versatile riverboat pilot, panner for gold, and inventor of mucilage; the devoted family man who (like all successful men, according to Dwight David Eisenhower) had married above his station and remained faithful and passionately affectionate to a loving, responsive woman who joined him in defying Victorian strictures to the extent of occasionally holding hands in public, and who, like Abigail Adams, shared his professional life, reading and vetting everything he wrote, and also raised and disciplined their daughters, managed the household, tolerated and sometimes even enjoyed his profanity, and to a degree came to share his indifference to religion; the self-made writer who won acceptance into the highest ranks of the nation's literary, cultural, political, and professional life; the world traveler who became widely venerated abroad; the impulsive, chronically unsuccessful businessman who lost a fortune investing in printing "compositors" and hairpins but rebuffed an invitation to purchase shares in the nascent telecommunications industry; the political liberal, who loved "Negro" culture and often sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" and, in bereft moments, Stephen Foster's "Why Do The Beautiful Die," and who deplored actual slavery in America, virtual slavery in the Belgian Congo, feudalism in Russia, anti-Semitism in Austria, and aggrandizement in religious institutions; the sensualist who admired the unselfconscious naturalness of uninhibited peoples in Hawaii, Fiji, and Nicaragua; the iconoclast who believed that Jesus was born but not raised and would never return to a randomly cruel world in which one incarnation was sufficient for anyone, and who agreed with an overheard slave's prayer, "Come yo'self, Lord, an' doan be sendin' yo' son, 'cause this ain't no time fo' chillun"; and the survivor, who saw his infant son and eventually his fragile wife succumb to heart disease, a daughter to meningitis, and a second daughter to epilepsy, leaving only a third daughter to survive him - and, even more sadly, although unknown to him, one whose own daughter was to commit suicide at age fifty-four, ending the line, and lending retrospective pathos to his geriatric admiration and acculturation of bright young girls as ersatz granddaughters.
Rating: 5
Summary: Engaging and Revealing
Comment: I felt drawn into Twain's world and the life that gave us Tom, Huck, the Connecticut Yankee and all Twain's political and religious convictions as never before. Fred Kaplan finally puts to rest those ill-founded murmurs about Twain being a racist with letters and documentation I'd never seen before; not to mention new information about Twain's strong position against American foreign incursions -- something ironically relevant these days. This "Singular Mark Twain" is such a complex, human, funny yet poignant figure, I only wished the book wouldn't end.
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Title: We Are Lincoln Men : Abraham Lincoln and His Friends by David Herbert Donald ISBN: 0743254686 Publisher: Simon & Schuster Pub. Date: 01 November, 2003 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens's World by Terrell Dempsey ISBN: 0826214851 Publisher: Univ of Missouri Pr (Txt) Pub. Date: November, 2003 List Price(USD): $44.95 |
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Title: Mark Twain and Orion Clemens: Brothers, Partners, Strangers (Studies in American Literary Realism and Naturalism) by Philip Ashley Fanning, Alan Gribben ISBN: 0817313109 Publisher: Univ. of Alabama Press Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: Dangerous Intimacy : The Untold Story of Mark Twain's Final Years by Karen Lystra ISBN: 0520233239 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 2004 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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Title: Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow ISBN: 1594200092 Publisher: The Penguin Press Pub. Date: 26 April, 2004 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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