A tall tale laced with typical Twainian humor and irony and ultimately meant not to be believed but enjoyed, Mark Twain’s (Samuel Langhorne Clemens’s) “The Notorious [Celebrated] Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” first appeared in an 1865 issue of the… Read More ›
Most scholars believe that near the end of his life, Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) became a brooding, bitter, disillusioned, and cynical man who doubted humans’ ability to right themselves and whose humor became increasingly dark and hopeless. His “The… Read More ›
Many readers find Mark Twain (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910) most successful in briefer works, including his narratives, because they were not padded to fit some extraneous standard of length. His best stories are narrated by first-person speakers… Read More ›
The Spanish words picaresque and picaro achieved currency in Spain shortly after 1600. Today they are terms in literary criticism, sometimes misused because of the vague meaning attached to them. The revival of the genre in the twentieth century was… Read More ›
It is instructive to note that the most pervasive structural characteristic of Mark Twain’s (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910) work, of his nonfiction as well as his fiction, is dualistic. That observation is not worth much without detailed… Read More ›
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