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Over at UneekDollDesigns, artist Debbie Ritter sells handmade dolls of famous authors and celebrated literary characters.

The collection includes the trio of ghosts who haunt Ebenezer Scrooge. Ritter has also created dolls of Jane Eyre from Charlotte Bronte‘s famous novel and Mrs. Haversham from Dickens’ Great Expectations.

Beatrix Potter and Peter Rabbit come as a matching set. Flavorpill made a list of other dolls, including Shel Silverstein, J.R.R. Tolkien and Joyce Carol Oates. Above, we’ve embedded a Mark Twain doll. What’s your favorite?

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I won’t make you wait for it. My apologies for the spillover into the sidebar, but it would require actual skill to adjust the size of the photo. So, like, that’s not happening!

This is Mark Twain’s first-floor library in his Hartford, Connecticut, home. How cool is that?

You can thank Emily Temple of Flavorwire for that shot, since she recently compiled a hot batch of photographs featuring the libraries of famous writers, inspired, in part, by the recent publication of Leah Price’s new book, Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books.

Below, a few more of my favorites . . .

Joan Didion, John Dunne, daughter Quintana Roo, and dog.

William Faulkner collected old books, apparently. Oh, wait.

Anne Sexton’s shelves look so . . . normal.

Norman Mailer lived in Brooklyn Heights, not far from my brother. But Norman had more books, and a better apartment. He also liked lamps.

This Rolling Stone gathers no moss, but collects books, obviously. If you are really in a Keith mood, go here for my ultimate “Keef Sings” mix.

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There’s a little bit of Mark Twain in this book, mostly from two sources, his short story “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” and, of course, his Huckleberry Finn character.

The story begins with a standard thriller device, the ticking bomb. Throw a deadline into a standard mystery and you immediately ratchet up the tension. In this case, look at the book’s opening paragraphs:

“My frog is missing,” croaked Stringbean Noonan. “And I MUST have him back by this Sunday at noon.”

“Sunday at noon?!” Mila exclaimed. “That’s only twenty-four hours from now.”

Stringbean stuffed two dollars into my coin jar. “There’s more where that came from,” he sniffed. “Just find that frog.”

Adonis, the missing frog, was no ordinary frog. (Love that name, btw.) He was a champion jumper with hops to spare, and there was a big frog-jumping contest coming up — with a $20 cash prize for the longest leap.

So already we’ve added motive to the mystery.

“Twenty dollars,” I whistled. “That’s a lot of money.”

I borrowed the first Twain idea in Chapter Five, “Want to Bet?” Most famously, there’s a character in Twain’s “The Notorious Jumping Frog from Calaveras County,” a noted gambler named Jim Smiley, who loves to bet. On anything. And everything. Twain describes him thus in the story:

“If he even seen a straddle bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him to get to — to wherever he going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the road.”

Anyway, I reread the story during the brainstorming stages of the book, when I was casting about for ideas, so I decided to give that character trait to a minor character, Jigsaw’s classmate, Eddie Becker, who I had established in previous books as being highly motivated by money.

Eddie loved to bet — and there wasn’t anything in the world he wouldn’t bet on. Two birds might be sitting on a telephone line. Eddie would bet which one would fly away first. He’d bet on a ball game or the color of the next car that drove down the street. The weirder the bet, the happier he was. Eddie was just one of those guys who needed to keep things interesting. Regular life wasn’t quite enough for him. Nah, there had to be something riding on it.

Jigsaw and Eddie enjoy a friendly bet. Later Eddie casually mentions a new suspect, Sasha Mink (another name I love). With Adonis now out of the way, Sasha stands to win the frog-jumping contest with her entr

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by Barbara Kerley   illustrated by Edwin Fotheringham   In an everything-old-is-new-again twist we get a biographical picture book portrait of Samuel Langhorne Clemens from a fresh pair of eyes... his daughter's.   "According to Susy, people were... well, just plain wrong about her papa."  And so begins both the story of and about Mark Twain's oldest daughter's attempt to capture the man she

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Did you know that President Thomas Jefferson, novelist Mark Twain, and evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin all wrote in the margins? According to the New York Times, marginalia was denounced in the 20th century as a form of graffiti. These days, scholars love marked up books.

The article offers these observations from University of Toronto professor Heather Jackson: “Books with markings are increasingly seen these days as more valuable, not just for a celebrity connection but also for what they reveal about the community of people associated with a work…examining marginalia reveals a pattern of emotional reactions among everyday readers that might otherwise be missed, even by literary professionals.”

The Caxton Club and the Newberry Library will host a symposium in March to debate this subject; Jackson will be speaking there as well. The event will spotlight on a new essay collection entitled Other People’s Books: Association Copies and the Stories They Tell. This title contains 52 essays and 112 illustrations.

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It's Valentine's Day--also known as Cybils announcement day. Months of hard work by an army of dedicated committee members has resulted in a list of high quality, highly entertaining books for children and young adult readers in an array of genres. Run, don't walk, to the Cybils site to check out the list of winners for 2010. But before you go! As a member of the Nonfiction Picture Book Panel,

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Flavorpill has collected the doodles of famous authors, including Sylvia Plath, David Foster Wallace, Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Allen Ginsberg, Mark Twain, Henry Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jorge Luis Borges.

The drawings ranged from insect portraits to nightmare images. Wallace drew one of the funnier pieces, doodling glasses and fangs on a photo of Cormac McCarthy.

Vonnegut (pictured with his artwork, via) incorporated many of his drawings into his books. He even had his own art gallery exhibitions. What author should illustrate their next book?

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According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, eight out of the top ten titles on college campuses are nonfiction books. Decision Points by George W. Bush topped the list.

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson were the only fiction books on the list. Life by Keith Richards and The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 by Mark Twain joined Bush’s memoir on the list. Humor titles by Jon Stewart and Tucker Max also made the cut.

What titles did you read while you were in college? The magazine surveyed university bookstores across the country for the list. Follow this link for the complete list of participating bookstores.

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The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Huckleberry Finn Censorship
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> Video Archive

Professor Alan Gribben defended his politically-corrected volume of Mark Twain‘s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer in different news outlets. He explained that his version of Twain’s works with two racial slurs removed will provide “a more palatable reading experience,” reaching classrooms and personal libraries where the work had been banned.

Here’s more from an article in The Birmingham News: “The Mark Twain guild has brought pretty universal condemnation, but I hope they might soften their views once the book comes out and they read my introduction and my reasons … I’m not going to apologize for this. I want readers to have this as an option.”

The New York Times rounded up commentary from nine different writers about the controversy. In addition, Stephen Colbert

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When I first heard about it, I thought maybe it was an Oulipian exercise: remove all the n-words from Huckleberry Finn.

But no, apparently the new edition only removes THE n-word. And replaces it with the word "slave".

Thus, the book will be more palatable to school boards, curriculum committees, parents, and students. They'll all be able to look past those 200+ uses of that word and pay more attention to the things that really matter in the book, because it's really a wonderful book ... except for that that word.

I really liked what novelist and teacher Nicole Peeler had to say on the subject:

...I would argue that Gribben, in choosing “slave,” does what so much of our media and our popular culture do every day: We act like racism is our history rather than our present. It’s like we’re trying to convince ourselves, as a nation, that the 13th Amendment was a cure-all for both slavery and racism. We know there are “problems,” still. We know the KKK still exists, and we’ve heard all of the statistics stating how African-American communities endure excessive rates of crime, poverty, and disease. But we are no longer a racist country, like we used to be “back then.” Right?

Wrong. While it’s true that many of its most disgusting symptoms, such as lynchings, are far, far less prevalent, racism obviously still exists. Oftentimes, it’s been replaced by other, more palatable and easily disguised incarnations. In high school, I watched white classmates sing along to gangsta rap, or call each other “nigga.” While Kakutani claims such lyrics, when used by the actual rap artists, “reclaim[…] the word from its ugly past,” there was nothing being reclaimed in the halls of my high school, by those resoundingly middle-class Caucasians.

Indeed, as I think about my teaching of “The Artificial Nigger” at LSUS, I have to confront a lot of hard truths. I think I had a hard time saying “nigger” in front of my class because I was afraid I would be misinterpreted. I think I was afraid that my students would assume I was a racist. Because, if I’m honest, I think I’m afraid that I am a racist. I’m afraid that because I grew up in a nation that no longer talks about race, except to roll its eyes and say, “Oh, that’s history,” I don’t spend enough time questioning ideas, stereotypes, actions, and cultural messages that are racist. I tell myself, “Some of my best friends are black,” and then I laugh, mostly out of exasperation, at the impossibility of it all. The fact that I’m proud to have black friends disgusts me, even as I’m proud to have black friends. “Look at me!” I think, “I’m not a racist!” As if I deserve some kind of reward. Then again, considering my grandfather was a member of the KKK, maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on myself.

Which leads me to my final point about such obfuscations of our past and of our present that Gribben’s censoring of Huckleberry Finn represents, and that is of confrontation. We must confront our own assumptions about race, as a nation, or we risk a dangerous complacency.

And that's just a taste of a long and thoughtful essay on the subject, the whole of which is well worth your time.

I've taught Huck Finn four or five times (maybe more) at the high school level, and every time it led to some of the best discussions I've had with any of my classes, because every time I have made the presence of the word nigger throughout the text a central part of our early di

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Political Cartoon by Nate Beeler, Washington Examiner






There are no less than 454 news stories for today alone on the intended release of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a new edition in which the words “nigger,” "Injun," and "half-breed" are replaced with the more politically correct "slave," "Indian," and "half-blood."  NewSouth Books, an Alabama Publisher, has drawn criticism from many fronts and has opened up debate that is ongoing and passionate.

Is this rewriting history, taking a revisionist approach, or is it making a great piece of American literature accessible to students who would otherwise not be able to study this book because schools are reluctant to use it?

The Rhode Show (Fox Providence) has done an excellent job of outlining what the buzz is all about.


One thing that all sides seem to agree on is that the word "nigger" makes us uncomfortable.  Some scholars defend Twain's language, believing that his readers should feel uncomfortable since it shines a light on the historic treatment of blacks.  People differ on whether the word should be used if it is within its historical context or whether it should be removed to soothe modern sensibilities.  Professor Alan Gribben, a Twain scholar and editor of the NewSouth edition believes he is helping schools to be able to get this classic book back into the curriculum.   According to Publishers Weekly, Twain himself defined a classic as "a book which people praise and don't read."  Gribben believes that the offensive "n-word" is causing a generation of school children to be deprived of this important American book and that the sanitized edition would make it easier for parents and teachers to accept.

However Twain was angry even when changes in punctuation were made by an editor.  Below is the forward from the original Huckleberry Finn. 

IN this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary ‘Pike County’ dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap- hazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many

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From Hawthorne to Twain to White to Roth: if American fiction and personal essays “are at times nearly impossible to distinguish,” it’s “because they share a common ancestor.” (Thanks, NYRB.)

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By Peter Stoneley

The last couple of years have been an up-and-down period for the reputation of Mark Twain (1835-1910). It started well with a special issue of Time Magazine in 2008 which reminded readers of Twain’s goodness, and of the fact that the “buddy story of Huck and Jim was not only a model of American adventure and literature but also of deep friendship and loyalty.” This was followed in 2010 by many celebrations to mark the centenary of his death, including a volume in the prestigious Library of America series. Headlining Twain as the most “beloved” and “cherished” author from “around the world,” the Library of America volume was an anthology of “Great Writers on His Life and Work.”

But there has been another Twain waiting for his turn in the public eye. Laura Skandera-Trombley brought this Twain into view with her book of 2010 on “the hidden story of his final years”, revealing just how vain, bad-tempered and vengeful he could be. Far from the world of children and their buddies, a key fact about the revealed Twain was that his secretary had presented him with a sex toy. Then earlier this month the University of California Press published the first volume of their three-volume edition of Twain’s autobiography. This made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. The autobiography had supposedly gone unpublished because it was so full of harsh truths about Twain’s contemporaries, his nation, and life generally that he himself had ordered that it not be published until 100 years after his death. Here Twain is in full spate, calling his secretary a “salacious slut,” settling many scores with business-partners who he thought had fleeced him, and referring to United States soldiers involved in imperial wars as “uniformed assassins.”

How can we go on seeing Twain as “the quintessential American” once we know that he had echoed Johnson’s comment that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”? How can we see him as about “deep friendship and loyalty” when he conceived intense enmities for so many of his closest associates? It turns out that the Twain we had known was, as the New York Times put it, a “scrubbed and sanitized version,” and here in the autobiography was the truth. Similarly the Daily Telegraph assured its readers that the autobiography was “likely to shatter the myth that America’s great writer and humorist was a cheerful old man.”

We might seek to temper the coverage of the publication of the autobiography, as the outstanding editors responsible for the California volume have themselves done. Although it is a great event in Twain scholarship to have a full and reliable edition, substantial parts of the autobiography had been published before, including most of the truly interesting parts. The parts dealing with the “salacious” secretary were not part of the autobiography, but are to be published as an appendix to the California edition, and the material had been discussed in some detail in earlier scholarship. And the sex toy? As an editor at the Mark Twain Project, Benjamin Griffin, has pointed out on the University of California Press website, this was a “massager” that was marketed to men and women as treatment for “rheumatism, headaches, neuralgia, and other ailments,” and Twain recommended the device to friends with seemingly no awareness that it might also serve as “a masturbation aid for women.”

Now, with the 175th anniversary of Twain’s birth on 30th November 2010, I have no further revelations to add. Nor do I wish to try to adjudicate between the “good Twain” and the “bad Twain.” What strikes me is how these fluctuations and polarizations in the image of Twain in the past year or so are but one mo

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This cartoon — found in Mark Twain Himself: a Pictorial Biography, thanks to Macy Halford — exposes my beloved Twain as a fellow noise-intolerant freak. Evidently he rose on Thanksgiving night at the cartoonist’s house “to stop the clocks that were interfering with his sleep.”

I myself have gotten out of bed to silence clocks in other people’s houses. I do this so customarily, in fact, that by now my sister would probably be surprised if I left the batteries in her guest room ticker intact. Even in my own apartment, I keep my midcentury-atomic model unplugged more often than not because once I become aware of its ticking I can’t concentrate on eating, talking, writing, or sleeping. Or anything else. I start to feel like a Poe character — I believe it was his timepiece. Yes, his timepiece!

The aversion runs in the family; my father once became so agitated at the sound of a clock in a hotel room that he tore the cord from the wall with such force, we couldn’t get it to restart the next morning. This kind of intolerance is often said to be learned rather than hereditary, but I am actually very distantly related to Twain through both of my dad’s maternal grandparents, who were his fifth cousins once-removed (grandmother) and twice-removed (grandfather), and maybe on my mom’s side too, so who knows?

As for Thanksgiving, Twain described the holiday as “a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for–annually, not oftener–if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors, the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man’s side, consequently on the Lord’s side; hence it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments.”
 

See also: Jenny Diski on noise; Dana, Ed Park, and me on teeth grinding; Thanksgiving menus from Twain’s day; and Donald Barthelme on Thanksgiving (“Thank you, O Lord, for what we are about to receive. This is surely not a gala concept”).

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Classic Treats That Never Grow Old

By Bianca Schulze & Phoebe Vreeland, The Children’s Book Review
Published: November 6, 2010

You love to give books as gifts, but you want to give a book that will be cherished and kept to be shared with future generations. Right? What you’re looking for is a classic. Something well-written, tried and tested, but perhaps with updated illustrations that will tantalize any young mind. Feast your eyes on the following delights …

Snow White: A Tale from the Brothers Grimm

by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (Author), Charles Santore (Illustrator)

Reading level: Ages 6-9

Hardcover: 48 pages

Publisher: Sterling (October 5, 2010)

Source: Publisher

Complete with a beautifully patterned ribbon marker, this is a nice retelling of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale, Snow White, illustrated by award-winning artist Charles Santore. Santore has also illustrated an Aesop’s Fables, The Wizard of Oz and  The Little Mermaid.

Add this book to your collection: Snow White: A Tale from the Brothers Grimm

Rapunzel

by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (Authors), Dorothée Duntze (Illustrator)

Reading level: Ages 4-8

Hardcover: 24 pages

Publisher: North-South Books (September 1, 2005)

Source: Publisher

A softer version of the original Grimm tale. The illustrations are happy and sunny.

Add this book to your collection: Rapunzel

Aesop’s Fables

Selected and illustrated by Lisbeth Zwerger

Reading level: Ages 4-8

Hardcover: 32 pages

Publisher: North-South Books; illustrated edition edition (April 1, 2006)

Source: Publisher

This is not the ultimate collection of Aesop’s Fables, however, it is a cleanly illustrated compendium carefully selected by the uber-award-winning artist Lisbeth Zwerger.

Add this book to your collection: Aesop’s Fables

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Raghuram G. Rajan won the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award for his book, Fault Lines. A £30,000 prize (approximately $47,300) accompanied the award.

The ceremony and dinner took place at New York’s famous Pierre hotel. During his acceptance speech he praised his publisher, Princeton University Press. Rajan said his wife had advised him on making the book easy-to-read. He thanked his two children, joking that had it not been for them, the book would have been written much faster.

The president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Vartan Gregorian delivered the evening’s keynote address. He mentioned the Harry Potter series, the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Mark Twain, and T.S. Eliot.

continued…

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Some writers shame and immobilize me with their brilliance, while others, like Twain, de Vries and Spark,[1] dwarf my own efforts but inspire me to keep on.

It’s hard to pinpoint what separates the two groups; if pressed I’d say it’s an affinity of perspective — a morbid fixation on the absurdities of human existence — combined with precision, bluntness, and humor.

Of late, E.B. White has joined the second group. I’ve been making my way through One Man’s Meat — a collection of essays about leaving New York City for his Maine farm — and I particularly enjoyed this bit from an essay on his failed efforts to raise turkeys for money:

[T]here is nothing harder to estimate than a writer’s time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments — moments of sustained creation — when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer’s time isn’t worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

I’ve previously mentioned this great aside, in the same vein, from his Paris Review interview:

Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer — he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive for him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along. I have no warm-up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink.

I guess the reason writers have to clear the decks is that they never know when the “moments of sustained creation” will come, and they have to be sitting in front of the page, waiting for them — and pushing through the others.

Which is to say (and to remind myself) that I’m still finishing my novel and, apart from the day job, doing very little else. Last week’s posting flare-up was an anomaly.
 

See (and hear) also: a 1942 interview with White on One Man’s Meat, rare recordings of the author reading from Charlotte’s Web and The Trumpet of the Swan, and his response to a fan who wanted to visit him at his farm: “Thank you for your note about the possibility of a visit. Figure it out. There’s only one of me and ten thousand of you. Please don’t come.”

1. Twain for his essays, de Vries for The Blood of the Lamb, and Spark for everything. ↩

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Summer Stock: Promoting Literacy in the Community
The Texas Woman’s University drama department is partnering with a local Girl Scout troop to promote literacy and the art of theater. This summer program engages kids through activities which are designed around beloved children’s book classics.

10 Weeks of Fun from RIF
Check out this great reading calendar from Reading Is Fundamental which includes fun learning activities for families to enjoy throughout the summer. This calendar incorporates creative learning ideas with everyday summer fun.

Book Reviews Delivered to Your iPhone
Kids Book Review is a new application for the iPhone which allows users to view book reviews on the go, helping shoppers make informed decisions about their book purchases. This also gives users the ability to post books to their Twitter or Facebook accounts to share reviews with friends.

125th Anniversary of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
Elmira, the city where Mark Twain penned his famous work, is celebrating the 125th Anniversary of the release of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Excerpts from the book will be read aloud and the first 125 kids will receive a free copy of the book.

How Learning to Read Changes Your Brain
This article details findings of an ancient ability to recognize both an object and its mirror image as identical and how this affects learning to read. Confusing similar letters, an error once assumed to indicate dyslexia, turns out to be a common mistake of learning.

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Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Stanford is editor of the 29-volume Oxford Mark Twain, and of The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Work (The Library of America), on which the comments that follow are based.  She is also the author of From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and imaginative Writing in America, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices, Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture, and A Historical Guide to Mark Twain.  We asked Fishkin to contribute to the blog in honor of the centennial of Twain’s death.

Ernest Hemingway said in 1935 that “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” But these days, as scholars increasingly focus on transnational dimensions of American culture, perhaps it’s time to look at Twain’s impact on writing outside of America, as well. The fact that this year marks the centennial of Twain’s death, the 175th anniversary of his birth, and the 125th anniversary of the U.S. publication of his most celebrated book makes it a perfect time to widen our angle of vision.

If we set out to look for an American author most likely to achieve a world readership, we would be hard-pressed to find a less promising candidate than Mark Twain at the start of his career. The dialect and slang that filled the title story of first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, struck some early foreign readers as impenetrable. And if they found the dialect and slang of Twain’s first book hard to understand, the insults he hurled at them in Innocents Abroad were, as one German writer put it, “unforgivable.” But Twain broke out of the mold with such original freshness that many Europeans who justly could have been offended were intrigued instead. Indeed, I’ve determined that the first book published anywhere on Twain was published

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Obama is in town! And no, I am not braving the already insane traffic of NYC to go snap pictures like a fangirl. He's the president, folks. Not Mark Twain.

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