Mark Twain - where to start?
By footnoteRaven
I’m not even sure why, but I keep feeling like I should read Mark Twain. What’s his best book to start with?
Reader discussion: Life on the Mississippi
Public reader discussion about Life on the Mississippi in the WeRead Catalog by Mark Twain.
Highly recommended non-fiction by fiction writers?
By WalksLetter
I’ve been going through stuff like this lately and would really like more non-fiction recs from writers who are mostly known for fiction: Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running Elif Batuman, The Possessed Hemingway, A Moveable Feast David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster Any ideas on what I should pick up next?
Mark Twain - Life on the Mississippi
By NinaInTucson95
Was anyone else kind of let down by this one? It’s still a good book, sure, but it wasn’t really what I expected from the title and all the hype around it. I was thinking there’d be way more of that river town atmosphere and the people you’d run into there — gamblers, deckhands, musicians, preachers, all that. But Twain barely seems interested in any of them. A more truthful title would probably be something like, My Short Time Working as a Pilot on the Mississippi, though obviously that wouldn’t have sold as well. I guess I just don’t get why someone who was so strong at describing people mostly skips over everyone around him during those four years on the river.
Found a Mark Twain quote in the Oxford English Dictionary on the word "lagniappe"
By cipherSail937
There was one really good word in there that felt like it was worth going all the way to New Orleans just to learn: “lagniappe.” It’s supposed to be a flexible, expressive, useful kind of word. I think they say it like “lanny-yap.” And they claimed it’s Spanish, though I’m not totally sure.
Mark Twain stands outside his boyhood home at 206 Hill Street in Hannibal, Missouri
By RoundFog
Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) just outside his old place at 206 Hill Street in Hannibal, Missouri, and there’s this brick sidewalk out front. There’s even a little kid in the far right photo bombing it. The guy who took/sold prints of it, Herbert Tomlinson, apparently kept doing that for years, so it makes sense this is one of the more well-known Twain pictures—at least for people in Missouri.
TIL Mark Twain outlived his wife and all but one of his four children
By BrownRiver31
That’s probably why the later parts of his biography get so dark, and why it basically just stops. The last entry is about Jean’s death.
Mark Twain on death
By SteadyEagle5
Mark Twain quote of the day! Sponsored by Rick’s Paperclips—“uniting humanity, one folder at a time,” I guess?
In his later life, Mark Twain befriended a dozen or so young girls between the ages of 11 and 16, a connection he would describe at the time as his "chief occupation and delight."
By Icy_Sail1990
I feel like a lot of people don’t really stop to think about how crushingly sad his life must’ve been. Mark Twain basically lost almost everyone he ever cared about—both parents, all his siblings except one, his wife, and three of his four kids. Even the one daughter who lived longer didn’t have a child until after he was gone. So I’m not sure it’s surprising that he latched onto kids’ happiness and their whole innocence, both personally and in his writing. It almost feels like that was his way of keeping himself together—like he was grabbing onto something light just to stay sane in a pretty depressing life. And honestly, I kind of get that idea that the real fuel for humor isn’t joy, it’s sorrow. Heaven probably wouldn’t have much of it either.
Mark Twain is a wonderful, American writer, but Mark Twain, is not the man's name as you think it is.
By looselantern
And nope, I’m not talking about Samuel Clemens’s other, more “Hollywood” sounding name. I mean the one he actually wanted people to know him by—Mark Twain. “Mark Twain” seems like something he grew up hearing too, back when he was on the Mississippi in Hannibal, Missouri. From what I understand, kids mostly dreamed about being boatmen, and the best/most important one was the pilot. But that pilot work apparently dried up when the Civil War hit, and after that he’s basically tied to the name. So yeah, I guess it’s his pen name. Not “Biblical Mark” or anything like that—more like “mark” as in measuring or making a note/boundary. And the “Twain” part… I’m pretty sure it’s the “two” meaning. Put together, “Mark Twain” turns into something like “a measurement of two,” and on the Mississippi at the time the main unit people used was the fathom—six feet. So “Mark Twain” was basically a call for 12 feet. Which makes sense with the steamboats, since they needed about two fathoms of water clearance before they could get going. They’d wait for the call—“Mark Twain!!!”—and that was basically the green light to start the engines.
Life on the Mississippi is one of my favorite books. What else might I enjoy?
By badgerpages1987
I’m looking for more memoirs that are funny but still informative, especially travel ones, though not only those.
Why did Archie Bunker call the telephone "the blower?" I've never heard this slang term used anywhere else.
By basilcomet77
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TIL that Mark Twain wrote the very first novel that was ever written with a typewriter. That novel was Tom Sawyer
By pink_raven
It feels pretty sloppy for a short 2-paragraph piece to miss something important right in the first paragraph, especially when it throws doubt on whether Tom Sawyer was the first typed novel. Like, Twain supposedly started messing with the typewriter in 1874 and was the first to have a manuscript actually typed. But in his own autobiographical stuff he says it was the Tom Sawyer manuscript from 1874. Then Darryl Rehr says nope—that it was Life on the Mississippi (1882) and the machine was a Remington No. 2. And the Wikipedia on typewriters basically lines up with that: Twain claimed he was the first major writer to hand a publisher a typewritten manuscript for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), but research suggests his memory was off, and the first typed book submitted was Life on the Mississippi (1883).
Mark Twain did the math for the Mississippi river (3rd quote down).
By basilcomet77
It kind of blows my mind that in about 176 years the Lower Mississippi has already shrunk by 242 miles. Do the math and it’s a little over a mile and change a year, so you’d think someone could just “see” that a million years back, in that Old Oolitic Silurian time, the river would’ve been insanely long, jutting out into the Gulf like a fishing rod. And then if you go the other way, you can almost picture it 742 years from now—like Cairo and New Orleans would’ve basically grown into the same place and be sharing everything. I don’t know, but science is weirdly fascinating like that. You toss in a small piece of fact and somehow you end up with a whole bunch of guesses.
What to read by Mark Twain?
By ink_midnight81
If you’re into those bohemian, Kerouac-style road stories, this is pretty great—also the writing is really eloquent. :)
I've never read anything by Mark Twain. Does his work still really hold up? Where is a good place to start?
By Lazy_Velvet39362
I’m a pretty big Kurt Vonnegut fan, and I know he always saw Twain as a huge influence on both his style and the ideas in his books, so I’ve been thinking about trying Twain. But I honestly have no idea where to begin, or even if his stuff is still really worth reading these days. Any suggestions?
I am confused with a sentence in “Life on the Mississippi “ by Mark Twain. It saids, “No other river has so vast a drainage-basin.”
By BookmarkBookish65
I think if you changed it to “No other river has a so vast drainage-basin,” it would read a lot more naturally to me. And then, about the style—can I do stuff like these? - She has so sweet a smile. - The city has so fantastic a skyscraper.
“Never argue with stupid people. They will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience” -Mark Twain
By cosmos_peastone
If 2020 taught me anything, it’s probably this: …
What is your favourite book by Mark Twain?
By Desk45
I really love Mark Twain, but here in the UK it feels like he’s not all that popular. Other than *Huckleberry Finn* and a few of the kids’ books, it’s kind of hard to track down his stuff. My favourite is *A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court*—and I honestly think it’s even funnier and more heartbreaking than *Huckleberry Finn*. I just love how he can jump from laugh-out-loud moments to something really deep and moving. I actually laughed and then ended up getting teary reading it.
The only existing footage of Mark Twain, filmed by Thomas Edison in 1909, a year before Twain's passing.
By paperbackmarket2003
Kinda feels like all those old famous guys were bros with each other sometimes.
Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain - unknown date. Help
By copperBrush
I just came across this addition of Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain. I can’t really tell what edition it is since there’s no ISBN or anything like that. If anyone knows how to figure it out (or recognizes it), I’d really appreciate the help. Sincerely, A recent buyer of an old house