Mark Twain Himself in Words and Pictures

Mark Twain Himself, produced by Milton Meltzer, is a 303-page hardcover published by Bonanza Books, a division of Crown Publishers Inc. The dust jacket shows shelf-wear and surface rubbing and some small closed tears. Inside, the spine is slightly bumped but the rest of the book is in very good condition. Book Summary Mark Twain's life was an "unswerving regularity of irregularity," he said. He reached old age by “sticking strictly to a scheme of Life which would kill anybody else.” That life-- one of the rarest, richest, and raciest America has known-- is captured here in a delightful mosaic of words and pictures. The words are Twain's own, taken from the vast variety of his writing-- not only the autobiography, but his letters, notebooks, newspaper reporting, sketches, travel pieces, even fiction. The pictures--more than 600--counterpoint Twain's text. Here is Mark himself, from The apprentice in his printers cap to the dying world famous figure finishing his last voyage in a wheelchair. The picture span the humor and tragedy of a life that ran from the frontier river town's of 1835 to the first decade of the new century. The tramp printer wandering through eastern cities hunting work; the river pilot and is steamboat days; the 2-week confederate soldier; The miner in Nevada's boomtowns, seized by a Comstock Frenzy; the reporter-at-large in San Francisco, Honolulu, Washington, and New York; the travel writer on the famed Innocents Abroad Voyage to Europe and the Holy Land... this is Mark Twain on the way to becoming the enormously popular author of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, life on the Mississippi, The Prince and the pauper, A Connecticut Yankee. The pictures and text in his handsome in abundant book reveal many other facets of this extraordinary personality. Here are Mark and Livy raising their three daughters in Hartford and Elmira; here are the publishing roller-coaster and the typesetting machine fiasco which drove the family abroad for nine long years. In Mark Twain Himself you will spend happy hours reliving the career of one of America's most pungent personalities. The hundreds of photos, prints, drawings, cartoons, paintings, the daguerreotypes, and broadsides, combined with the matchless words of our greatest writer, make Mark Twain Himself a must for everyone, from those old enough to have lived in Mark's own day to those growing up and in America he helped to shape. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 60 - 11545