The American Critical Archives is a series of reference books that provide representative selections of contemporary reviews of the main works of major American authors. Specifically, each volume contains both full reviews and excerpts from reviews that appeared in newspapers and weekly and monthly periodicals, generally within a few months of the publication of the work concerned. This 1999 book is a systematic, comprehensive gathering of the reviews (primarily in the United States and Britain) of Mark Twain's books published up until 1917. The reviews collected here are essential reading for anyone interested in Twain criticism and reception. In addition, by devoting attention to each individual work, the volume provides the broadest possible perspective on Twain's career.

Praise for the previous edition:RASD/ALA "Outstanding Reference Source, 1996""'Essential' is the word for it!

This book explores Twain's major writings as they address the New World and the Old, race, slavery, imperialism, the possibility of American literary form and the limits of humour. Twain's humour is an expression of the pleasure and fun of life, but it is also a response to ultimate contradictions and losses. It is particularly American in that it rarely points to harmonies that might actually be enjoyed beyond itself. It is the humour of someone always on the move if not on the run. The absence of any destination in Twain, other than the ultimate one of death, is why his work is so formally unsettled. There is no point of clarification where author, narrator and readers can be expected to arrive together. Texts treated in this book include The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, The Gilded Age, A Connecticut Yankee, Pudd'nhead Wilson, Following the Equator, The Mysterious Stranger,and several short pieces.

Originally published in 1993. The purpose of this volume is to lay out documents which give an estimate of Mark Twain as a humourist in both historical scope and in the analysis of modern scholars. The emphasis in this collection is on how Twain developed from a contemporary humourist among many others of his generation into a major comic writer and American spokesman and, in several more recent essays by younger Twain scholars, the outcomes of that development late in his career. The essays determine how the humor takes on meaning and importance and how the humor works in a number of ways in the literary canon and even in the persona of Mark Twain.

An anthology of Civil War stories from nineteenth-century magazines.

In this magisterial full-scale biography of America’s greatest storyteller and satirist, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Fred Kaplan refashions our image of Mark Twain and etches a vibrant portrait of a singular personality who created some of the most memorable literary characters of our culture. He coined the phrase “the Gilded Age,” spoke out vigorously against racism and imperialism, and in his multifaceted singularity as writer, businessman, polemicist, investor, inventor, and self-promoter became the most widely extolled and most dominant icon of American literature. As Kaplan writes, “There has been no one like him since.”

Autobiography of Mark Twain Volume 2 by Benjamin and Harriet Elinor pdf free download. Editorial work on the Autobiography of Mark Twain began some eight years ago and is expected to continue for another two. But acquiring the collective skills, expertise, and materials that allow us to do the work has taken much longer: more than four decades of editorial labor on every aspect of Mark Twain’s writings, made possible by the continuous support, since 1967, of the national Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency.

Readers of Mark Twain seldom doubt his genius, but defining that genius and locating its source continue to challenge students of American literature. Equally elusive is an explanation of the intriguing phenomenon of Twain as a mythic figure, both shaper and embodier of an American mythos. Perhaps no single critical approach can adequately assess the complex force behind Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain. This native genius, our quintessential artist, rightfully provokes a number of powerful responses, as these original essays demonstrate.