Old Times on the Mississippi (Mark Twain's Collector's Edition) - Softcover

Twain, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3849674835 ISBN 13: 9783849674830

Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag, 2017

Synopsis

When Mark Twain was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among his comrades in the village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. There were transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. When a circus came and went, it left the boys burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to that section left them all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then they had a hope that if they lived and were good, God would permit them to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained. ‘Old Times on the Mississippi’ is a collection of seven short stories, that appeared in the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ of the 1870s.

About this title

About the Author:

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, best known to his readers by his pen-name of Mark Twain, was born at Florida, Missouri, on 30th November 1835. After learning the trade of a printer and working as a pilot on the Mississippi, he eventually became a journalist in San Francisco. His Innocents Abroad (1869), the result of a foreign tour, had an enormous success, and thenceforward his reputation as a humourist was established. His subsequent books include Roughing It (1872), Tom Sawyer, A Tramp Abroad, The Prince and the Pauper, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The American Claimant, The £1,000,000 Bank-Note, Pudd'nhead Wilson, The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg, and A Double-Barrelled Detective Story (1902). His share in an unfortunate publishing house drove him to a lecturing tour round the world (1895-96), which enabled him fully to re-establish his fortunes. Mark Twain's humour has secured him a large audience not only in America and this country, but also in Germany and other Continental countries. It is the dry, incisive humour of a shrewd man of the world who, having gone through life with his eyes wide open, has cheered himself by laughing not merely at the faibles of his fellow-men, but, by implication, at his own as well. He is not very reverent in his attitude towards what he considers worn-out survivals of old beliefs and superstitions, and sometimes pokes fun without much discrimination, as in A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc; but when his humour is, as it generally is, at its best and freshest the result to his readers is delightful. In Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, perhaps, Mark Twain showed his power at its highest point, his humour and pathos developed with consummate ease and force in a succession of vividly adventurous episodes.

About this edition

• Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 3849674835
• ISBN 13: 9783849674830
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 62