MARK TWAIN
Mark Twain by A.F. Bradley, New York, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
aka: Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Dates: 1835-1910
Nationality: American
Literary Periods:
- American Realistic Period, 1865-1900
- Nineteenth Century, 1800-1899
Literary Movements:
- American Regionalism (c.1875-1910)
WIT & WISDOM
Mark Twain's Helpful Hints for Good Living (2004) by
Irreverent, charming, eminently quotable, this handbook--an eccentric etiquette guide for the human race--contains sixty-nine aphorisms, anecdotes, whimsical suggestions, maxims, and cautionary tales from Mark Twain's private and published writings. It dispenses advice and reflections on family life and public manners; opinions on topics such as dress, health, food, and childrearing and safety; and more specialized tips, such as those for dealing with annoying salesmen and burglars. Culled from Twain's personal letters, autobiographical writings, speeches, novels, and sketches, these pieces are delightfully fresh, witty, startlingly relevant, and bursting with Twain's characteristic ebullience for life. They also remind us exactly how Mark Twain came to be the most distinctive and well-known American literary voice in the world. These texts, some of them new or out of print for decades, have been selected and meticulously prepared by the editors at the Mark Twain Project.
Call Number: E-BookISBN: 0520242459
HAL HOLBROOK IN
MARK TWAIN TONIGHT!
Borrow from Library: Hal Holbrook in Mark Twain Tonight!
New York Times review of the show
SELECTED AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Chapters from My Autobiography (1906-1907) (1996) by
Beginning in January 1906, Clemens dictated in some 242 sittings a long and complex autobiographical manuscript. He published selected chapters from this extensive dictation in the North American Review, in 26 installments, and it is this version that is published here. "Reading along, onebecomes aware of being spoken to by this book, that it is really a chat," Arthur Miller writes in his introduction. "It is wonderfully visual, full of recollected pictures, the best kind of listening. You can just about hear him laughing, or his voice growing husky in the sad parts. Clearly thereare long rambles with no particular thematic relevance beyond the simple pleasure of the telling, like rummaging through cabinets and closets and trying on discarded shoes, old gloves and a half-remembered jacket or two." In this volume, Miller writes, "the author who more than any other was thesurveyor who marked the boundaries of American literature" reflects on his childhood, ponders his career as a writer, and recalls the joy and the pain of being a husband and a father.
Call Number: Miller PS1331 .A2 1996ISBN: 0195101561
The autobiography of Mark Twain : including chapters now published for the first time (1990) by
The wonderfully readable and endlessly fascinating autobiography of one of America's foremost men of letters.
Call Number: Miller PS1331 .A2 1990ISBN: 0060920254
Mark Twain and Life on the Mississippi (1982) by
A depiction of the period of Mark Twain's life when he wrote Life on the Mississippi examines the book's evolution and literary organization.
Call Number: Miller PS1314 .K713 1981ISBN: 0870233300
COMING SOON
Enter the online exhibit from the University of California at Berekeley.
REFERENCE & BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Scribner Writers Series
Essay on the life and works of Mark Twain, complete works and suggested reading bibliographies
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- Literature Online (LION) [DATABASE]Biographical overview, complete bibliography, journal articles, audio & video recordings, and recommended Web sites
- Literature Resource Center [DATABASE]Includes entries from Dictionary of Literary Biography, Contemporary Authors, Twayne's Authors Series, and Scribner Writers Series
Mark Twain A to Z : the essential reference to his life and writings (1995) by
Comprising over 1250 entries enhanced with r arely published photos, this is the most authoritative refer ence to one of America''s most acclaimed authors. His classic works include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. '
Call Number: Bowdoin folio PS1331 .R37 1995ISBN: 0816028451
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Mark Twain (1993) by
"A model reference work that can be used with profit and delight by general readers as well as by more advanced students of Twain. Highly recommended." - Library Journal Thenbsp;Routledge Encyclopedia ofnbsp;Mark Twain includesnbsp;more than 700 alphabetically arranged entries thatnbsp;cover a full variety of topics on this major American writer's life, intellectual milieu, literary career, and achievements. Because so much of Twain's travel narratives, essays, letters, sketches, autobiography, journalism and fiction reflect his personal experience, particular attention is given to the delicate relationship between art and life, between artistic interpretations and their factual source. This comprehensive resourcenbsp;includes information on: Twain's life and times: the author's childhood in Missouri and apprenticeship as a riverboat pilot, early career as a journalist in the West, world travels, friendships with well-known figures, reading and education, family life and career Complete Works: including novels, travel narratives, short stories, sketches, burlesques, and essays Significant characters, places, and landmarks Recurring concerns, themes or concepts: such as humor, language; race, war, religion, politics, imperialism, art and science Twain's sources and influences. Useful for students, researchers, librarians and teachers, this volume features a chronology, a special appendix section tracking the poet's genealogy, and a thorough index. Each entry also includes a bibliography for further study.
Call Number: Colby PS1330 .M37 1993ISBN: 9780824072124
The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain (2003) by
For what scandalous reason was the original publication of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn delayed? What were the names of Samuel Clemens pets? How are his attitudes towards politics and religion revealed in his work? Find the answers to these questions and many more in The OxfordCompanion to Mark Twain, which encapsulates the most important scholarship on Twains life, his works, and his times.Organized in an A-Z format, the volume contains entries on all of his works, people and places related to his biography, and analyses of Twains takes on a variety of topics, from confidence games to slavery. It also features five essays by major Mark Twain scholars on important aspects of his lifeand work, and interspersed throughout are essays on selected Twain classics by such literary luminaries as Arthur Miller, Frederick Pohl, and Nat Hentoff.Featuring an extensive bibliography, a comprehensive index, a chronology of Twains works, and over forty illustrations, The Oxford Companion to Mark Twain is the most authoritative and complete reference work available and is perfect for student and fan alike.
Call Number: Miller PS1331 .O97 2003ISBN: 0195107101
RESEARCH & CRITICISM
Find books, essays and journal articles in MLA International Bibliography
MLA International Bibliography is the definitive literary research database, indexing the most authoritative scholarship on Mark Twain from books and academic journals. MLA indexes and links to the entire JSTOR literary research collection as well as linking to many other full-text providers.
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- Mark Twain Journal [JOURNAL]2004--
See also Mark Twain Quarterly (1936-1951)
Mark Twain Journal (1964-1982)
Mark Twain Circular: A Newsletter of the Mark Twain Journal (2002--) - The Mark Twain Annual [JOURNAL]2003--
The Mark Twain Annual publishes critical and pedagogical articles about Mark Twain.
Mark Twain : a reference guide (1977) by Call Number: Bates & Bowdoin PS1331 .T45 1977ISBN: 0816179662
Constructing Mark Twain : new directions in scholarship (2002) by
The thirteen essays in this collection combine to offer a complex and deeply nuanced picture of Samuel Clemens. With the purpose of straying from the usual notions of Clemens (most notably the Clemens/Twain split that has ruled Twain scholarship for over thirty years), the editors have assembled contributions from a wide range of Twain scholars. As a whole, the collection argues that it is time we approach Clemens not as a shadow behind the literary persona but as a complex and intricate creator of stories, a creator who is deeply embedded in the political events of his time and who used a mix of literary, social, and personal experience to fuel the movements of his pen. The essays illuminate Clemens's connections with people and events not usually given the spotlight and introduce us to Clemens as a man deeply embroiled in the process of making literary gold out of everyday experiences. From Clemens's wonderings on race and identity to his looking to family and domesticity as defining experiences, from musings on the language that Clemens used so effectively to consideration of the images and processes of composition, these essays challenge long-held notions of why Clemens was so successful and so influential a writer. While that search itself is not new, the varied approaches within this collection highlight markedly inventive ways of reading the life and work of Samuel Clemens.
Call Number: Bates PS1337.3 .C66 2001ISBN: 0826213774
A Historical Guide to Mark Twain (2002) by
Mark Twain (born Samuel Clemens), a former printer's apprentice, journalist, steamboat pilot, and miner, remains to this day one of the most enduring and beloved of America's great writers. Combining cultural criticism with historical scholarship, A Historical Guide to Mark Twain addresses awide range of topics relevant to Twain's work, including religion, commerce, race, gender, social class, and imperialism. Like all of the Historical Guides to American Authors, this volume includes an introduction, a brief biography, a bibliographic essay, and an illustrated chronology of theauthor's life and times.
Call Number: E-BookISBN: 0195132920
PRIMARY SOURCES
Major collections of Clemens's papers are at:
the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley- the Beinecke Library, Yale University
- the New York Public Library
- the Mark Twain Memorial and Stowe-Day Foundation, Hartford, Connecticut
- the Library of Congress
- the Houghton Library, Harvard University
- the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library
- the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin
- the Mark Twain Museum, Hannibal, Missouri
- the Vassar College Library
- the Alderman Library, University of Virginia
- the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Quarry Farm, Elmira College, New York
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Thanks to a generous gift from Doris Grumbach,- The Oxford Mark Twain [BOOK SET]Edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin (29 volumes)
The works of Mark Twain [BOOK SET] by
The humorist reflects on his scuffling years -- silver mining in Nevada, working at a Virginia City newspaper, down and out in San Francisco, reporting for a newspaper from Hawaii, and more.
Call Number: Bowdoin PS1300 .F72ISBN: 0520020189
Mark Twain : the contemporary reviews (1999) by
The American Critical Archives is a series of reference books that provide representative selections of contemporary reviews of the main works of major American authors. Specifically, each volume contains both full reviews and excerpts from reviews that appeared in newspapers and weekly and monthly periodicals, generally within a few months of the publication of the work concerned. This 1999 book is a systematic, comprehensive gathering of the reviews (primarily in the United States and Britain) of Mark Twain's books published up until 1917. The reviews collected here are essential reading for anyone interested in Twain criticism and reception. In addition, by devoting attention to each individual work, the volume provides the broadest possible perspective on Twain's career.
Call Number: Miller PS1338 .M298 1999ISBN: 0521390249
Mark Twain : the complete interviews (2006) by
The great writer's irascible wit shines in this comprehensive collection Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews is an annotated and indexed scholarly edition of every known interview with Mark Twain. In these interviews that span his entire career, Twain discusses matters as varied as his lecture style, his writings, and his bankruptcy, while holding forth on such timeless issues as human nature, politics, war and peace, government corruption, humor, race relations, imperialism, international copyright, the elite, and his impressions of other writers. These interviews are oral performances in their own right and a new basis for evaluating contemporary responses to Twain's writings. The interviews are records of verbal conversations rather than texts written in Twain's hand. Four interviews are new to scholarship; fewer than a fifth have ever been reprinted. .
Call Number: Miller PS1331 .A2 2006ISBN: 9780817315221
Speeches (1910) (1996) by
One of the most renowned public speakers of his day, Mark Twain was often asked to give speeches to mark public holidays or important anniversaries, for school graduations, at banquets for distinguished visitors, and at events sponsored by charitable organizations, reform groups, and the like.Published a few months after his death, this wide-ranging collection of speeches, spanning more than four decades, covers the gamut of Mark Twain's interests. Here are speeches on women's rights, on cigars and billiards, and on the extension of the copyright law. We find occasional pieces, banquettoasts and introductions that, in addition to being amusing in themselves, provide a vivid glimpse of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social rituals. Also present are some of Twain's most controversial and daring speeches, such as the notorious "Whittier Birthday" Speech, in which he pokedfun at three giants of New England literary culture to the horror of his audience; and "The Babies," which closes with a memorable image of the guest of honor: an infant Ulysses S. Grant attempting to put his toe in his mouth.
Call Number: Colby PS1322 .S5 1996ISBN: 0195101588
Mark Twain's speeches by Call Number: Special Collection ROBSN PS2022 .M34 1910
Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals, Volume II (1976) by
The twelve notebooks in volume 1 provided information about the eighteen years in which the most profound, even dramatic, changes took place in Clemens' life. He early achieved the limits of his boyhood ambition by becoming a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, a position there is no reason to believe he would have abandoned if the Civil War had not forced him to do so. In fleeing from a war which principle and temperament prevented him from supporting, Clemens entered into the first stages of his literary career by serving as a reporter for newspapers in Virginia City and San Francisco. When the restricted experiences available to a local reporter had been thoroughly explored, he moved on as a traveling correspondent to the Sandwich Islands and then still farther to Europe and the Near East. The latter travels provided him with material for The Innocents Abroad, the book that established Mark Twain as a popular author with an international reputation in 1869. In 1872 he further exploited his personal history by publishing Roughing It and in the same year visited England to gather material on English people and institutions. He returned to England the following year, this time accompanied by his family and by a secretary who would record the observations printed as the last notebook in volume 1. Volume 2 of Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals, documenting Clemens' activities in the years from 1877 to 1883, consists largely of the record of three trips which would serve as the source for three travel narratives: the excursion to Bermuda, a prolonged tour of Europe, and an evocative return to the Mississippi River. Despite the common impulse to preserve observations and impressions for literary use, the contents of the notebooks are remarkably different in their vitality-and the works which developed from the notes are correspondingly varied.
Call Number: Colby PS1302.A48 1975 v. 1 - v. 3ISBN: 0520025423
Mark Twain's Letters, Volume 1 (1988) by
"This auspicious beginning of what may come to be regarded as one of the most important collections of letters by an American author takes 17-year-old Sam Clemens, searching for work as an itinerant printer, from Hannibal, Mo., to age 31, when, established as the writer Mark Twain in California, he is on his way to wealth and worldwide fame. During these 14 years, he travels from the East Coast to the West, working along the way as a steamboat pilot, gold hunter, newspaper writer and editor, foreign correspondent, storyteller and humorous lecturer. Wherever he settlesin big cities, Nevada mining camps or Hawaiihe writes entertainingly to his family and friends about the moods and experiences, sights and sounds he encounters. Reading these letters is like anticipating Life on the Mississippi, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn in some ways more enjoyably because of their freshness and spontaneity. Less than three-fifths of the book consists of the actual letter texts; the rest is editorial apparatus so admirably organized and set forth as to become a source of wonder to general readers and delight to advanced students of literary history. Appendixes include genealogies, maps, photographs, manuscript facsimiles and a detailed commentary. The book constitutes a major publishing venture." --Publishers Weekly "This initial volume in the first comprehensive edition of Twain's letters (about half first published here) takes us from 1853 when at age 17, he left Hannibal to 1866 when at age 31, he was on the verge of a great career. Lively and informative, they are addressed mostly to family members and record Twain's erratic progress from Mississippi riverboat apprentice-pilot to Nevada Territory gold prospector to San Francisco newspaper reporter. The notes included are both interesting and exhaustive, and the volume as a whole provides welcome insight into the later works, particularly Life on the Mississippi and Roughing It, of a great American writer." Charles C. Nash, English Dept., Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo." --Library Journal "An astonishingly dull but comprehensively annotated collection of letters from an unexceptional period in Twain's life. Like the phone book, this is one of those hefty tomes you're terribly glad exists, even though there's little reason to go through it cover to cover. Its very thoroughness, its rounding up of every epistolary scrap, from bills, to perfunctory thank-yous, to itineraries of arrivals and departures, ensures vast stretches of tedium. But even when not quarreling over printing details with his publisher or setting up dates for speaking tours, Twain the correspondent bears little relationship to Twain the genius of 19th-century American literature. Even when he is corresponding with intimate friends or his beloved wife, Olivia (Livy), there is an unrevealing quality to almost every letter, as if he were deliberately resting his talent. Salamo and Smith (members of the Mark Twain Project at the Bancroft Library, Univ. of California) are to be commended for the incredible depth, range, and detail of their work. Their scholarship is impeccable, their erudition extensive--one has the feeling that they could probably account for almost every hour of Twain's life--and learned footnotes abound, often dwarfing the brief letters. During this time span, Twain embarked on building a house, suffered the death of a child, and made regular visits to England, sometimes to lecture, sometimes to bask in the warm admiration of the British. He also published his only cowritten book (The Gilded Age, with Charles Dudley Warner). But Huckleberry Finn and the full flowering of Twain's talent are still several years away. A major scholarly resource, but slow-going and unrewarding, proof of how compartmentalized genius can sometimes be." --Kirkus Review
Call Number: Colby PS1331.A4 1988 v.1 - v.6ISBN: 0520036689- Mark Twain's library : a reconstruction (1980) by Call Number: Bowdoin College Library PS1342.B6 G7 v.1-2ISBN: 081618156X
WWW
- Twainquotes.com [WEB]Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections, & Related Resources compiled by Barbara Schmidt
- Charting the Autobiographies of Mark Twain [WEB]by Hal L. Waller at the University of Virginia
- TwainWeb [WEB]Mark Twain Forum