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| Mark Twain
ISBN: 9780198038061
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Literature;
The first entry in the "Lives and Legacies" series, which aims to take a fresh look at some of the greatest minds in the humanities and sciences, this book is packed with original observations about the most written-about American writer. Ziff (Johns Hopkins Univ.), one of America's foremost literary scholars, breaks his discussion into four parts--"Celebrity," "Tourist," "Novelist," and "Humorist." Writing for readers with a working knowledge of the man and his best-known works, Ziff shows, for instance, how a sentence's grammatical structure accounts for its humor and how the brown skin of the natives of India "forcibly attracted Twain to color: the color of skin, the color of garments, and the warm vitality they signify." While he does not dwell at length on Twain's worldwide celebrity, his life with wife Livvie, or his growing pessimism, he does briefly discuss the minor novels The American Claimant and The Gilded Age, the unchanging character of Tom Sawyer, and Twain's righteous ire at Walter Scott's fictions. Highly recommended.--Charles C. Nash, emeritus, Cottey Coll., Nevada, MO (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.
Larzer Ziff is Research Professor at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of six books on American literary culture, including The American 1890s, which won the Christian Gauss Award, and he is the editor of works by Emerson, Thoreau, Stephen Crane, Melville, Hawthorne, and Dreiser. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. |
