Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Broadview Editions)

Synopsis

Samuel Clemens was born in 1835, on the last day of November, in Florida, Missouri. This small, obscure village near the middle of the United States was the starting point for a life of world-wide travel and fame. At age four his family moved to Hannibal, a slightly larger town on the western bank of the great Mississippi River. This was the place to which his imagination would later most often return, but at seventeen he ran away from it to look for his future in larger places. He worked as a typesetter in the East, a riverboat pilot between St. Louis and New Orleans, and a prospector and a reporter in the far West before discovering, on the verge of his thirtieth birthday, that his "call," as he put it in a letter to his family, was "to literature of a low order--i.e. humorous."1 After 1865 he lived alternately in eastern cities such as Buffalo, Hartford, and New York, in various places in Europe, including London, Paris, Vienna, and Florence, and on the road, as a touring lecturer and a travel writer gathering material. As a best-selling author and popular humorist he made a fortune, but never had enough money to satisfy his own ambitions. Over the years he spent more of his time and energy, and too much of his literary earnings, in a series of investments and speculations that promised to make him fabulously rich but instead, in 1894, during one of the American economy's periodic downturns, led to a well-publicized bankruptcy. To repay his creditors, he undertook a lecture tour around the world; the attention and laughter that greeted him wherever he went firmly established his status as America's first international celebrity. Though he was on intimate terms with presidents and corporate tycoons, and received honorary degrees from prestigious universities, common people saw him as one of them. Grateful for the pleasure he had given them, a huge audience shared in his triumphs and sympathized with his tragedies. These included the deaths of three of his four children and of his beloved wife, Olivia Langdon. He called her Livy; she called him Youth. He died on 21 April 1910, in Redding, Connecticut.

Copyright:

2010

Book Details

Book Quality:

Excellent

ISBN-13:

9781554810048

Publisher:

Broadview Press

Date of Addition:

04/20/18

Copyrighted By:

Stephen Railton

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Literature and Fiction

Submitted By:

170

Proofread By:

170

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.