Old Times on the Mississippi

Old Times on the Mississippi – Mark Twain

When Mark Twain was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among his comrades in the village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. There were transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. When a circus came and went, it left the boys burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to that section left them all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then they had a hope that if they lived and were good, God would permit them to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained. ‘Old Times on the Mississippi’ is a collection of seven short stories, that appeared in the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ of the 1870s.

Old Times on the Mississippi

Old Times on the Mississippi

 

Format: Paperback

Old Times on the Mississippi.

ISBN: 9783849674830.

Available at amazon.com and other venues.

 

Biography of Mark Twain (from Wikipedia):

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. Among his novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called “The Great American Novel”.

Twain was raised in Hannibal, Missouri, which later provided the setting for Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He served an apprenticeship with a printer and then worked as a typesetter, contributing articles to the newspaper of his older brother Orion Clemens. He later became a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River before heading west to join Orion in Nevada. He referred humorously to his lack of success at mining, turning to journalism for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. His humorous story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”, was published in 1865, based on a story that he heard at Angels Hotel in Angels Camp, California where he had spent some time as a miner. The short story brought international attention and was even translated into French. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.

Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, but he invested in ventures that lost most of it—notably the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter that failed because of its complexity and imprecision. He filed for bankruptcy in the wake of these financial setbacks, but he eventually overcame his financial troubles with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers. He chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, even after he had no legal responsibility to do so.

Twain was born shortly after an appearance of Halley’s Comet, and he predicted that he would “go out with it” as well; he died the day after the comet returned. He was lauded as the “greatest humorist this country has produced”, and William Faulkner called him “the father of American literature”.

 

(The text of the last section was taken from a Wikipedia entry and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.)

 

Publisher’s Note: This book is printed and distributed by Createspace a DBA of On-Demand Publishing LLC and is typically not available anywhere else than in stores owned and operated by Amazon or Createspace.

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