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Archive for the ‘Mark Twain Writings’ Category

Hal Holbrook’s Mark Twain Tonight !

April 14th, 2011 | admin

 

Television history was made on March 6, 1967 when an audience of over 30 million viewers tuned in to watch the first television broadcast of Hal Holbrook’s landmark one-man show, Mark Twain Tonight! The 90-minute special was a tour de force, and was acclaimed as one of the high points in television history. Most startling is the freshness of Twain’s stinging commentary on politics, the art of lying, religion, patriotism, slavery, and Man’s notion that he is the Creator’s pet.

Holbrook seems to improvise his way through the gold mine of Twain’s writing, stitching it together from many sources, allowing us to see into the heart and soul of the great humorist at 70. For the first time on video, Hal Holbrook’s classic performance captures the flamboyant humor and irreverence of Mark Twain. Now all generations of viewers can experience one of the truly greatest television specials of all time. For more information on this DVD or to purchase, please visit www.kultur.com

The Autobiography of Mark Twain

April 13th, 2011 | admin

Autobiography of Mark Twain Book

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) has been likened to Walt Whitman as one of the most quintessentially American writers this country has produced. While this book does not contain Mark Twain’s complete autobiography, the stories do leave us with more of a flavor for the man and the legend. As Charles Neider writes in his introduction, “Mark Twain’s autobiography is a classic of American letters to be ranked with the autobiographies of Ben Franklin and Henry James… It has the marks of greatness in it—style, scope, imagination, laughter, tragedy.”

It becomes clear that Mark Twain was much more than just a writer. He was a father, a husband, a son, a brother, a friend. With these bits of memory, we share the tragedies, triumphs, and adventures of his life. These memories are colored by emotions, and tempered by the fact that the book appeared only after he was dead. As he says, “Now then, that is the tale. Some of it is true.”

Early Life & After

Mark Twain helps us to imagine what his childhood was like: the embarrassments, the pranks, and the sibling rivalry… But, as he writes, “a boy’s life is not all comedy; much of the tragic enters into it.” Twain writes, “I was always told that I was a sickly and precarious and tiresome and uncertain child and lived mainly on allopathic medicines during the first seven years of my life.” “My mother had a good deal of trouble with me but I think she enjoyed it,” Twain writes. In his many misadventures, we are sometimes reminded of Tom Sawyer. Throughout Twain’s narrative, characters from his novels continue to pop up here and there: Huck Finn, Jim, Injun Joe, Aunt Polly, Colonel Sellers, and so many others under other names. Life appears to be much stranger and more imaginative than fiction for the young Samuel Clemens.

Writing & Life

After Mark Twain survived childhood, he led many different lives. He lived and worked all over the world, writing about his many experiences. Even when there’s obvious bitterness related to some of his experiences, he infuses the narrative with humor. Even in tragedy, he’s able to triumph through the power of language. He does, after all, have the last word.

Charles Neider writes, “Mark Twain’s life was a long and rich one; it seemed to him an inexhaustible mine of recollection. The associations streamed out from it in a million directions and it was his quixotic hope to capture most of them with the irony and humor and storytelling gift which were his own way of regarding human drama.” The Past, Present and Future Merging in the End

Mark Twain writes, “I am grown old and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.” Great men often write about their lives as they near death. It may be a way of coping with their inevitable demise. Mark Twain, the great American writer and hero is facing the end as he pens the words.

We can hear him crying out in words when he experienced the deaths of his wife and daughters. As he writes about their deaths, so it becomes clear that not enough could ever be written about his life. The spirits of the dead seem to surround him, weighing him down. He remembers all his friends and his enemies. All are dead.

“The storm raged all night,” writes Twain. “It has raged all the morning. The snow drives the landscape in vast clouds, superb, sublime…” It’s the end.

Autobiography of Mark Twain Book

The world’s largest archive of Mark Twain’s writings is located at The Bancroft Library on the UC Berkeley campus. Working inside this archive is an award-winning team of scholars dedicated to collecting, preserving, understanding, editing and publishing authoritative critical editions of everything Mark Twain wrote, both in print and electronically as e-books and as an online reference (www.marktwainproject.org). The Mark Twain Project’s editors are now producing the first complete and reliable edition of the Autobiography of Mark Twain. www.thisismarktwain.com