Barend van der vorm biography books

Ernest Hemingway once said of Huckleberry Finn :. If you read it, you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. Near the completion of Huckleberry Finn , Twain wrote Life on the Mississippi , which is said to have heavily influenced the novel. In it, he also explains that "Mark Twain" was the call made when the boat was in safe water, indicating a depth of two or twain fathoms 12 feet or 3.

Twain produced President Ulysses S. Grant 's Memoirs through his fledgling publishing house, Charles L. Webster and Company , which he co-owned with Charles L. Webster , his nephew by marriage. A Connecticut Yankee shows the absurdities of political and social norms by setting them in the court of King Arthur. The book was started in December , then shelved a few months later until the summer of , and eventually finished in the spring of Twain's next large-scale work was Pudd'nhead Wilson , which he wrote rapidly, as he was desperately trying to stave off bankruptcy.

From November 12 to December 14, , Twain wrote 60, words for the novel. This novel also contains the tale of two boys born on the same day who switch positions in life, like The Prince and the Pauper. It was first published serially in Century Magazine , and when it was finally published in book form, Pudd'nhead Wilson appeared as the main title; however, the "subtitles" make the entire title read The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Comedy of The Extraordinary Twins.

Twain's next venture was a work of straight fiction that he called Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and dedicated to his wife. Twain said a year before his death that this was the work that he was most proud of, despite the criticism that he received for it, writing: " I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well.

And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others needed no preparation and got none. Twain specifically insisted it to be an anonymous publication so that readers would take it as a serious historical account. To pay the bills and keep his business projects afloat, Twain had begun to write articles and commentary furiously, with diminishing returns, but it was not enough.

He filed for bankruptcy in During this time of dire financial straits, Twain published several literary reviews in newspapers to help make ends meet. Twain became an extremely outspoken critic of other authors and other critics; he suggested that, before praising Cooper's work, Thomas Lounsbury , Brander Matthews , and Wilkie Collins "ought to have read some of it".

George Eliot , Jane Austen , and Robert Louis Stevenson also fell under Twain's attack during this time period, beginning around and continuing until his death. Twain places emphasis on concision, utility of word choice, and realism; he complains, for example, that Cooper's Deerslayer purports to be realistic but has several shortcomings.

Ironically, several of Twain's own works were later criticized for lack of continuity Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and organization Pudd'nhead Wilson. Twain's wife died in while the couple were staying at the Villa di Quarto in Florence. After some time had passed, he published some works that his wife, his de facto editor and censor throughout her married life, had looked down upon.

The Mysterious Stranger is perhaps the best known, depicting various visits of Satan to earth. This particular work was not published in Twain's lifetime. His manuscripts included three versions, written between and the so-called Hannibal, Eseldorf, and Print Shop versions. The resulting confusion led to extensive publication of a jumbled version, and only recently [ when?

Twain's last work was his autobiography , which he dictated and thought would be most entertaining if he went off on whims and tangents in non-chronological order. Some archivists and compilers have rearranged the biography into a more conventional form, thereby eliminating some of Twain's humor and the flow of the book. The first volume of the autobiography, over pages, was published by the University of California in November , years after his death, as Twain wished.

Twain's works have been subjected to censorship efforts. According to Stuart , "Leading these banning campaigns, generally, were religious organizations or individuals in positions of influence — not so much working librarians, who had been instilled with that American "library spirit" which honored intellectual freedom within bounds of course ".

For two decades, Twain lived in a house in Hartford, Connecticut — , and the American Publishing Company in that city published the first edition of several of his books. Webster and Company. Twain's views became more radical as he grew older. In a letter to friend and fellow writer William Dean Howells in , Twain acknowledged that his views had changed and developed over his lifetime, referring to one of his favorite works:.

When I finished Carlyle 's French Revolution in , I was a Girondin ; every time I have read it since, I have read it differently — being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and environment And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat. Twain was a staunch supporter of technological progress and commerce. He was against welfare measures, because Twain believed that society in the " business age " is governed by "exact and constant" laws that should not be "interfered with for the accommodation of any individual or political or religious faction".

By present standards Mark Twain was more conservative than liberal. He believed strongly in laissez faire, thought personal political rights secondary to property rights, admired self-made plutocrats, and advocated a leadership to be composed of men of wealth and brains. Among his attitudes now more readily recognized as liberal were a faith in progress through technology and a hostility towards monarchy, inherited aristocracy, the Roman Catholic church, and, in his later years, imperialism.

Twain wrote glowingly about unions in the river boating industry in Life on the Mississippi , which was read in union halls decades later. Who are the oppressors? The few: the King, the capitalist, and a handful of other overseers and superintendents. Who are the oppressed? The many: the nations of the earth; the valuable personages; the workers; they that make the bread that the soft-handed and idle eat.

Twain further wrote "Why is it right that there is not a fairer division of the spoil all around? Because laws and constitutions have ordered otherwise. Then it follows that laws and constitutions should change around and say there shall be a more nearly equal division. Before , Twain was largely in favor of imperialism. In the late s and early s, he spoke out strongly in favor of American interests in the Hawaiian Islands.

In the New York Herald , October 16, , Twain describes his transformation and political awakening, in the context of the Philippine—American War , to anti-imperialism :. I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific Why not spread its wings over the Philippines, I asked myself? I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for three centuries.

We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the Pacific, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves. But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris which ended the Spanish—American War , and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines.

Barend van der vorm biography books

We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land. During the Boxer Rebellion , Twain said that "the Boxer is a patriot.

He loves his country better than he does the countries of other people. I wish him success. From , soon after his return from Europe, until his death in , Twain was vice-president of the American Anti-Imperialist League , [ ] which opposed the annexation of the Philippines by the United States and had "tens of thousands of members". The Incident in the Philippines , posthumously published in , was in response to the Moro Crater Massacre , in which Moros were killed.

Twain wrote: "In what way was it a battle? It has no resemblance to a battle We cleaned up our four days' work and made it complete by butchering these helpless people. Twain was critical of imperialism in other countries as well. In Following the Equator , Twain expresses "hatred and condemnation of imperialism of all stripes". Reports of outrageous exploitation and grotesque abuses led to widespread international outcry in the early s, arguably the first large-scale human rights movement.

In the soliloquy, the King argues that bringing Christianity to the colony outweighs "a little starvation". The abuses against Congolese forced laborers continued until the movement forced the Belgian government to take direct control of the colony. During the Philippine—American War , Twain wrote a short pacifist story titled The War Prayer , which makes the point that humanism and Christianity's preaching of love are incompatible with the conduct of war.

It was submitted to Harper's Bazaar for publication, but on March 22, , the magazine rejected the story as "not quite suited to a woman's magazine ". Eight days later, Twain wrote to his friend Daniel Carter Beard , to whom he had read the story, "I don't think the prayer will be published in my time. None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth.

Twain acknowledged that he had originally sympathized with the more moderate Girondins of the French Revolution and then shifted his sympathies to the more radical Sansculottes , indeed identifying himself as "a Marat " and writing that the Reign of Terror paled in comparison to the older terrors that preceded it. I am said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle.

I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute. Twain was an adamant supporter of the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of slaves, even going so far as to say, " Lincoln 's Proclamation Twain was also a supporter of women's suffrage , as evidenced by his " Votes for Women " speech, given in Helen Keller benefited from Twain's support as she pursued her college education and publishing despite her disabilities and financial limitations.

The two were friends for roughly 16 years. Through Twain's efforts, the Connecticut legislature voted a pension for Prudence Crandall , since Connecticut's official heroine, for her efforts towards the education of young African-American women in Connecticut. Twain also offered to purchase for her use her former house in Canterbury, home of the Canterbury Female Boarding School , but she declined.

At 62, Twain wrote in his travelogue Following the Equator that in colonized lands all over the world, "savages" have always been wronged by " whites " in the most merciless ways, such as "robbery, humiliation, and slow, slow murder, through poverty and the white man's whiskey"; his conclusion is that "there are many humorous things in this world; among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages".

Where every prospect pleases, and only man is vile. Twain's earlier writings on American Indians reflected his view of essentialized racial difference. Twain wrote in "The Noble Red Man" in His heart is a cesspool of falsehood, of treachery, and of low and devilish instincts. With him, gratitude is an unknown emotion; and when one does him a kindness, it is safest to keep the face toward him, lest the reward be an arrow in the back.

To accept of a favor from him is to assume a debt which you can never repay to his satisfaction, though you bankrupt yourself trying. The scum of the earth! In the same tract, Twain advocates genocide, describing the "Noble Aborigine" as : "nothing but a poor filthy, naked scurvy vagabond, whom to exterminate were a charity to the Creator's worthier insects and reptiles which he oppresses" [ ] This piece sought to undermine the sympathy felt on the "Atlantic seabord" for Native Americans.

There was seldom a sane one among them. Twain was a Republican for most of his life. However, in , Twain publicly broke with his party and joined the Mugwumps to support the Democratic nominee, Grover Cleveland , over the Republican nominee, James G. Blaine , whom he considered a corrupt politician. In the early 20th century, Twain began decrying both Democrats and Republicans as "insane" and proposed, in his book Christian Science , that while each party recognized the other's insanity, only the Mugwumps that is, those who eschewed party loyalties in favor of voting for "the best man" could perceive the overall madness linking the two.

Twain was a Presbyterian. For example, Twain wrote, "Faith is believing what you know ain't so", and "If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be — a Christian". Twain generally avoided publishing his most controversial [ ] opinions on religion in his lifetime, and they are known from essays and stories that were published later.

In the essay Three Statements of the Eighties in the s, Twain stated that he believed in an almighty God, but not in any messages, revelations , holy scriptures such as the Bible, Providence , or retribution in the afterlife. Twain did state that "the goodness, the justice, and the mercy of God are manifested in His works", but also that " the universe is governed by strict and immutable laws ", which determine "small matters", such as who dies in a pestilence.

At other times, he conjectured sardonically that perhaps God had created the world with all its tortures for some purpose of His own, but was otherwise indifferent to humanity, which was too petty and insignificant to deserve His attention anyway. In , Twain criticized the actions of the missionary Dr. William Scott Ament — because Ament and other missionaries had collected indemnities from Chinese subjects in the aftermath of the Boxer Uprising of After his death, Twain's family suppressed some of his work that was especially irreverent toward conventional religion, including Letters from the Earth , which was not published until his daughter Clara reversed her position in in response to Soviet propaganda about the withholding.

Little Bessie , a story ridiculing Christianity, was first published in the collection Mark Twain's Fables of Man. Twain raised money to build a Presbyterian Church in Nevada in Twain created a reverent portrayal of Joan of Arc , a subject over which he had obsessed for forty years, studied for a dozen years and spent two years writing about.

Those who knew Twain well late in life recount that he dwelt on the subject of the afterlife, his daughter Clara saying: "Sometimes he believed death ended everything, but most of the time he felt sure of a life beyond. Twain's frankest views on religion appeared in his final work Autobiography of Mark Twain , the publication of which started in November , years after his death.

In it, Twain said: [ ]. There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing, and predatory as it is — in our country particularly and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree — it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime — the invention of Hell.

Measured by our Christianity of to-day, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the Deity nor his Son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilled. Twain was a Freemason.

They also gave him a Book of Mormon. The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament. Twain used different pen names before deciding on "Mark Twain". He signed humorous and imaginative sketches as "Josh" until Additionally, Twain used the pen name "Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass" for a series of humorous letters.

Twain maintained that his primary pen name came from his years working on Mississippi riverboats, where two fathoms, a depth indicating water safe for the passage of boat, was a measure on the sounding line. Twain is an archaic term for "two", as in "The veil of the temple was rent in twain. Twain said that his famous pen name was not entirely his invention.

In Life on the Mississippi , Twain wrote:. They related to the stage and condition of the river, and were accurate and valuable; At the time that the telegraph brought the news of his death, I was on the Pacific coast. I was a fresh new journalist, and needed a nom de guerre ; so I confiscated the ancient mariner's discarded one, and have done my best to make it remain what it was in his hands — a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth; how I have succeeded, it would not be modest in me to say.

Twain's story about his pen name has been questioned by some, [ ] with the suggestion that "mark twain" refers to a running bar tab that Twain would regularly incur while drinking at John Piper's saloon in Virginia City, Nevada. Samuel Clemens himself responded to this suggestion by saying, "Mark Twain was the nom de plume of one Captain Isaiah Sellers, who used to write river news over it for the New Orleans Picayune.

He died in and as he could no longer need that signature, I laid violent hands upon it without asking permission of the proprietor's remains. That is the history of the nom de plume I bear. I was a cub pilot on the Mississippi River then, and one day I wrote a rude and crude satire which was leveled at Captain Isaiah Sellers, the oldest steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, and the most respected, esteemed, and revered.

For many years he had occasionally written brief paragraphs concerning the river and the changes which it had undergone under his observation during fifty years, and had signed these paragraphs "Mark Twain" and published them in the St. Louis and New Orleans journals. In my satire I made rude game of his reminiscences. It was a shabby poor performance, but I didn't know it, and the pilots didn't know it.

The pilots thought it was brilliant. They were jealous of Sellers, because when the gray-heads among them pleased their vanity by detailing in the hearing of the younger craftsmen marvels which they had seen in the long ago on the river, Sellers was always likely to step in at the psychological moment and snuff them out with wonders of his own which made their small marvels look pale and sick.

However, I have told all about this in "Old Times on the Mississippi. That poor old Captain Sellers was deeply wounded. He had never been held up to ridicule before; he was sensitive, and he never got over the hurt which I had wantonly and stupidly inflicted upon his dignity. I was proud of my performance for a while, and considered it quite wonderful, but I have changed my opinion of it long ago.

Sellers never published another paragraph nor ever used his nom de guerre again. While Twain is often depicted wearing a white suit, modern representations suggesting that he wore them throughout his life are unfounded. Evidence suggests that Twain began wearing white suits on the lecture circuit, after the death of his wife in However, there is also evidence showing Twain wearing a white suit before In , he sent a photograph of himself in a white suit to year-old Edward W.

Bok , later publisher of the Ladies Home Journal , with a handwritten dated note. The white suit did eventually become Twain's trademark, as illustrated in anecdotes about this eccentricity such as the time he wore a white summer suit to a Congressional hearing during the winter. In his autobiography, Twain writes of his early experiments with wearing white out-of-season: [ ].

Next after fine colors, I like plain white. One of my sorrows, when the summer ends, is that I must put off my cheery and comfortable white clothes and enter for the winter into the depressing captivity of the shapeless and degrading black ones. It is mid-October now, and the weather is growing cold up here in the New Hampshire hills, but it will not succeed in freezing me out of these white garments, for here the neighbors are few, and it is only of crowds that I am afraid.

Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read View source View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Wikidata item. American author and humorist — For other uses, see Mark Twain disambiguation. Writer humorist entrepreneur publisher lecturer. Adventure fiction speculative fiction travelogue opinion journalism literary criticism polemic essay autobiography correspondence oration.

Olivia Langdon. Love of science and technology. The report of my death was an exaggeration. Early journalism and travelogues. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. See also: Twain—Ament indemnities controversy. Main article: Mark Twain in popular culture. Archived from the original on June 3, Retrieved October 28, The New York Times.

April 22, ISSN Archived from the original on August 28, Retrieved August 28, Faulkner at Nagano. Tokyo: Kenkyusha, Ltd. Chicago: World Book, Inc. The Guardian. ISBN X p. The Mark Twain Annual 6 : 51— JSTOR Archived from the original on October 31, Retrieved October 31, Hispanic Division, Library of Congress. Archived from the original on October 26, Retrieved October 26, The Untold History of the United States.

Library of Congress. His sentiments about the war and the war in the Phillippines [ sic ] were published nationwide. PBS News Hour. Archived from the original on July 2, Retrieved July 2, Mark Twain Journal. Archived from the original on June 5, Retrieved June 4, Archived from the original on December 9, Inventing Mark Twain. William Morrow.

ISBN Archived from the original on January 19, The Singular Mark Twain. Archived from the original on March 2, Retrieved October 11, Ed Egge. The Pennsylvania Genealogical Magazine, Volume Archived from the original on April 19, Retrieved April 16, Genealogy Volume 1—2; a weekly journal of American ancestry. Mark Twain: A Life. Free Press.

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Vecht, the director of the Amsterdam-based art dealership Kunstzalen A. The Euro replaced that currency. Every detail of the lips, the eyebrows, and the off-kilter eyes matched up. Admirers of Spinoza owned works by Graat, so the two had intersecting networks. Flipping a Spinoza, evidently, holds promise of more than a percent profit.