1897 essay mark other oxford story tell twain

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How to Tell a Story and Other Essays

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To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number. Would you like to tell us about a lower price? If you are a seller for this product, would you like to suggest updates through seller support? A series of essays by Twain on reading and writing.

Even more intriguing, he looks at his celebrated dramatic performances of his written work, describing his struggle to perfect the delivery of Jim Blaine's story of his Grandfather's Ram from Roughing It , and comparing the end result to the original written version.

Other pieces include "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses," as Twain takes Cooper to task for committing, "in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page [of The Deerslayer] In other pieces, Twain defends the virtue of a dead woman, tries to protect ordinary citizens from insult by railroad conductors, and, in "The Private History of the 'Jumping Frog' Story," translates his celebrated story first into the "original" French, and then back into English.

A delightful collection of Twain's wit and wisdom. Read more Read less. Kindle Cloud Reader Read instantly in your browser. Customers who viewed this item also viewed these digital items. Page 1 of 1 Start over Page 1 of 1. Audible Audiobook. Recommended popular audiobooks. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Book 1. Where the Crawdads Sing. If It Bleeds. About the Author Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American humorist, novelist, writer, and lecturer.

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Please try again later. Verified Purchase. Book exactly as described, good price and instantaneous shipping. Seller recommended! It was a Hail Mary play. Driven to bankruptcy in , Mark Twain set out to pay his debts and rebuild his fortune. He was hampered in that effort by a series of unhappy events, being stricken with grief in by the death of his beloved daughter Suzy among them.

Received by the public with middlin' acclaim, sales of the book nevertheless helped the Twain family sleep under a roof until finally, in , they were rescued from ruin with the help of Mr.

Rogers on the board at Standard Oil. Not to make too much of that, we see there that some benefits did attach to being 'America's most-beloved author'. The first of them is titular: 'How to Tell a Story' uses 10 pages to discuss technical differences between writing a shaggy dog for enjoyment by readers and telling a shaggy dog in front of a live audience.

The joke there is that the two efforts at telling the same story entail entirely different narrative tactics. The book's second offering is 'In Defence of Harriet Shelley. Twain's beef with Dowden was the biographer's mealy-mouthed attempt to cover Shelley's sexual obsessions by painting Shelley's first wife, Harriet a child bride aged 16 scarlet. Dowden laid all the blame for Shelley's contemptible excesses at the foot of Harriet's innocent bed. In doing so, Twain was justified: Dowden's treatment of Shelley and his first wife is more than grossly unfair.

Dowden's "Life of Shelley" is as greasy and craven a piece of hagiography as I'd ever want to see. But for this writer beating that same horse over and over across 76 pages made Twain's case tiresome rather than funny.

Long before Twain was done, I began to feel that Twain looked as much the ass as he sought to make of Dowden and Shelley. The third essay, 'Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences,' is truly funny. It is a rich chortle made richer by the fact that its seemingly hyperbolic charges are all perfectly true. I first read James Fenimore Cooper at my mother's knee. Revisiting that experience some years ago, I couldn't be sure my ol' Ma inflicted Cooper upon me because his stories were some of her childhood favorites or if she wanted to scare her little boy away from Walt Disney's equally awful "Davy Crockett" yarns.

Many of today's readers, never having read his books, probably have no idea how horrid a novelist Fenimore Cooper actually was. For them, Mark Twain explains it all in fine detail across 25 pages.

Paul Bourget. Edward Dowden than they care about other 19th-century authorial cat fights. Bradley's 'Introduction' provides a wryly humorous and keenly perceptive take on how childhood exposure to "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" set him on a long path that led him as a young man to eschew the concoction of racist polemics and become an author, instead. Passionate writers of whatever stripe, if they're in search of a voice and an audience, should heed David Bradley.

Covici's 'Afterword' illuminates the tales and essays that appear in HTS, helping readers make sense of them by explaining the context that sparked their creation. As the title hints, HTS is chock-full of good, solid advice for budding writers.

But in the year , HTS wouldn't read near so well without the contributions of Covici and Bradley. It is in their essays as much or more than in the work of Twain himself where the strength of this edition resides.

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How to Tell a Story and Other Essays () is a series of essays by Mark Twain. In them, he describes his own writing style, attacks the idiocy of a fellow author. How to Tell a Story and Other Essays () (The Oxford Mark Twain) by Twain, Mark and a great selection of related books, art and.

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How to tell a story. In defence of Harriet Shelley. Fenimore Cooper's literary offences. Traveling with a reformer. Private history of the "Jumping frog" story. Mental telegraphy again.

How to Tell a Story and Other Essays (1897)

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