In his person and in his pursuits,Mark Twain(1835-1910) was a man
of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve, when
his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from
Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University.
His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer,
Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and
publisher. He made fortunes from his writing, but toward the end of
his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was
hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental-and also pessimistic,
cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia for the past
helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters
as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called "the
Lincoln of our literature."
Justin Kaplan is the author of numerous books including Mr. Clemens
and Mark Twain, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book
Award; Mark Twain and His World; Walt Whitman- A Life; and with his
wife, Anne Bernays, Back Then- Two Lives in 1950s New York. In
1985, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and
Letters.
John Seelye is a leading American Studies scholar and Graduate
Research Professor Emeritus of American Literature at the
University of Florida. His books include The True Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain in the Movies- A Meditation with
Pictures, and Beautiful Machine- Rivers and the Republic Plan,
1755-1825.
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