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Mark Twain

T

tpeltz

New Member
Who here likes Mark Twain??? I love all of his books....did any of you read The Adventures of Tomas Sawyer or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?? Those are my favorites of all his books. Those books I could read over and over, each time learning something new. :D

And for all of you that don't know this, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the seqel to The Adventures of Tomas Sawyer. :p
 
hi and sorry to disappoint you, i don't like mark twain, i think he is a nice guy, who tried to be a writer and i think his settings and everything are kind of the same, sorry!!
 
no offense taken. I know some people who hate all his books. I just like adventure books and things of that nature.
 
I love Twain's humor. Some of his more subversive writing is spectacular. He can point out all the foibles of human nature without being malicious.

Some of my more out of the way faves are Pudd'nhead Wilson, Eve's Diary, and Letters from the Earth.
 
"You don't know about me without you have read..."

I have to be careful about opening up Huckleberry Finn. I know I will be pulled in right away and I'll end up sitting for hours and reading it again. I can't resist it.
 
Love his books

As a teenager, I wrote this Mark Twain quotation on the front page of all my textbooks: 'I have never let my schooling interfere with my education' :)
 
I found that once I got a little older and started reading more of Twain, particularly his short stories and poems, I realized what a poignant writer he is.
Honeydevil, I suggest you try reading The Man who Corrupted Hadleyburg. It is an amazing story that might help redeem Twain. His poem A War Prayer is phenomenal as well.

As for me... I love Twain!!! :p
 
I really love Twain, Huckleberry Fin, Puddin' Head Wilson, and his shorts are my favorites. Aside from his books, he's such an influential and intelligent human being. I think he has a lot to offer in anything you read, and definitely give it some more chances, there is a Twain book out there for anyone.
 
Oooooh, one of my all time favorite authors. People read Tom Sawyer and think that he's a relatively simple story teller, but if you pick up Huckleberry Finn you find out that he's much more than that - his insights into the human condition, and specifically slavery, are incredible.

I love his piece about James Fenimore Cooper - I can never read him again without noticing the atrocious grammar and poor construction of his work.

As a satirist, he is without compare. As a storyteller he is mesmerizing. As a reporter, a travel writer, and/or an essayist he is the standard by which all others are judged, in my opinion. One of the few instances where a reputation is deserved.

The way he tells a personal story makes me think of Spaulding Gray, or what he would have been 100 years ago. Weird thought.
 
Ja9
I just returned from Maui. Fell into an old bookstore off the street in Lahaina and found a small paperback called Mark Twain's Travels in Hawaii. Apparently when he was working for the Sacramento Bee, his assignment was to travel to this island of natives and pure paradise and write about it. It's a good read if you're in Hawaii and experiencing the places you're reading about.. FYI
shari
 
Shari! I am loving your signature - too, too funny. Great choice.

I didn't know that Twain wrote about Hawaii. Did you ever see the PBS special about him that aired not long ago? Since I don't own a TV I had to invite myself to someone's house who does, and it was so worth it. He had a sad life, and one of the things that was sad was how much of his output in later years was because of financial problems. I read once that some of his travel writing was done mainly because he needed the money; his wife was sick and he didn't want to be away from home, but it paid the bills.

Alexandre Dumas did a lot of travel writing too. There is a story that he was supposed to go with the critic Jules Janin on a tour of Europe, and at the last minute Janin couldn't go. Nevertheless, Dumas began sending regular dispatches from Europe that were full of conversations with Janin - he was paid by the word, and his explanation for the subterfuge was that he could not pass up the financial possibilities of passages like:
"Is that so, my dear Janin?"
"I have it on the best authority, my dear Dumas"
"But can you prove it?"
"Of course I can!"
"Then please do"
"Without hesitation!"
 
I loved those little gems in Tom Sawyer that you can't forget - like the scene where Tom's aunt delegates him to paint the fence, and Tom manages to coerce his friends into doing the work by charging them to be allowed to paint.
 
And how can you not love the whole scene where Tom goes to his own funeral? After everyone has just finished eulogizing him and saying what a wonderful boy he was, and how they would give anything to have him back, they couldn't very well punish him, now could they?

Or the passage about the last day of school when Tom and his friends contrived to gild the top of the schoolmaster's head and then snatched off his wig in front of the whole town?

I guess I should be somewhat relieved that I don't have any brothers...
 
I also loved his logic, whereby anytime one of his superstitions didn't work out, it must be because of a witch.
 
Gotta love Twain!. Huck Finn was a great book, good anti-slavery message in there as well. Too bad a few school won't allow it due to it's language.:(

I also enjoy some of the shorter stories that he has. Stories such as the jumping frog of Calveras county(may not be right, but it was a good story nevertheless) I also liked his War Prayer writing, which was a criticism of the Spanish-American War of the early 1900s-it wasn't published until the 1920s though.
 
I started to read because of Twain. He is awesome! As a kid, I could not stop laughing and my parents had to confiscate my books from my hands otherwise I would read and read and read forgetting about sleeping, doing homework or eating.

My mom however was please with this fenomenon. She said that when she was a kid, she also used to laugh when she read Twain. But then she went to some kind of a summer camp and her roommates asked her what was so funny. She gave them her Twain book, expecting similar reactions, but after a while peolpe just gave her book back and said "OK, I do not see what is so funny! What a stupid story about painting that fence, for instance!" and "what an unacceptable behavior in a sunday school!"

Isn't it a funny story by itself? So my mom was pleased that I am not that kind of a person!
 
The novels that I have completed are Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but I still have Life On the Mississippi and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court to read. They've sat on my shelves for many years being neglected among a massive collection of books. Tom Sawyer shows the wear of repeated readings; it's just such a wonderful story! I read some of Twain's shorts in school, but I can't remember the titles of them.

Didn't one of his quotes go something like, "Truth is always stranger than fiction because fiction, afterall, has to make sense"?
 
Mark Twain is one of my favorite writers too. Besides Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer I liked Innocents Abroad. And since I currently live in Hawaii, I love his Letters from Hawaii. Humorous writing is the most difficult because you have to have a good wit, and be a good writer. Twain is both. And although he comes across curmudgeonly and cynical, his heart and soul shine through his humor. I would have loved to have known him.
Linda Collison/Star-Crossed
 
I might be the only person on the planet who really dislikes Mark Twain's style.
I hate his fiction. I don't like the voices or his taste for exaggeration. I imagine him, a well-educated wealthy guy living in a giant house in Connecticut, inventing these 'American Southern' characters to 'teach' everyone else what America is all about. It's preposterous.

Sure, I know he travelled around and worked on a riverboat and had a few interesting jobs. Who didn't? It's sort of the equivalent of some kid thumbing across country in the 70's and then purporting to be an expert on middle America. Something about Twain is very George W. B. Fake, that is.
 
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