Gary Scharnhorst – författare

~The Red Badge of Courage," written in 1895 by Stephen Crane (1871-1900), is considered by many literary critics to be one of the greatest of all American novels. This is a book about the Civil War, and one Union soldier's struggle with his inner demons as he prepares for, and fights his first battle.

Better known in 1882 as a cultural icon than a serious writer, Oscar Wilde was brought to North America for a major lecture tour on Aestheticism and the decorative arts. With characteristic aplomb, he adopted the role as the ambassador of Aestheticism, and he tried out a number of phrases, ideas, and strategies that ultimately made him famous as a novelist and playwright. This exceptional volume cites all ninety-one of Wilde's interviews and contains transcripts of forty-eight of them, and it also includes his lecture on his travels in America.

Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934), Nathaniel Hawthorne's only son, lived a long and influential life marked by bad circumstances and worse choices. Raised among luminaries such as Thoreau, Emerson, and the Beecher family, Julian became a promising novelist in his twenties, but his writing soon devolved into mediocrity.What talent the young Hawthorne had was spent chasing across the changing literary and publishing landscapes of the period in search of a paycheck, writing everything from potboilers to ad copy. Julian was consistently short of funds because--as biographer Gary Scharnhorst is the first to reveal--he was supporting two households: his wife in one and a longtime mistress in the other.The younger Hawthorne's name and work ethic gave him influence in spite of his haphazard writing. Julian helped to found Cosmopolitan and Collier's Weekly. As a Hearst stringer, he covered some of the era's most important events: McKinley's assassination, the Galveston hurricane, and the Spanish-American War, among others.When Julian died at age 87, he had written millions of words and more than 3,000 pieces, out-publishing his father by a ratio of twenty to one. Gary Scharnhorst, after his own long career including works on Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and other famous writers, became fascinated by the leaps and falls of Julian Hawthorne. This biography shows why.

Better known in 1882 as a cultural icon than a serious writer, Oscar Wilde was brought to North America for a major lecture tour on Aestheticism and the decorative arts. With characteristic aplomb, he adopted the role as the ambassador of Aestheticism, and he tried out a number of phrases, ideas, and strategies that ultimately made him famous as a novelist and playwright. This exceptional volume cites all ninety-one of Wilde's interviews and contains transcripts of forty-eight of them, and it also includes his lecture on his travels in America.

Better known in 1882 as a cultural icon than a serious writer, Oscar Wilde was brought to North America for a major lecture tour on Aestheticism and the decorative arts. With characteristic aplomb, he adopted the role as the ambassador of Aestheticism, and he tried out a number of phrases, ideas, and strategies that ultimately made him famous as a novelist and playwright. This exceptional volume cites all ninety-one of Wilde''s interviews and contains transcripts of forty-eight of them, and it also includes his lecture on his travels in America.

Julian Hawthorne (1846-1934), Nathaniel Hawthorne''s only son, lived a long and influential life marked by bad circumstances and worse choices. Raised among luminaries such as Thoreau, Emerson, and the Beecher family, Julian became a promising novelist in his twenties, but his writing soon devolved into mediocrity.

What talent the young Hawthorne had was spent chasing across the changing literary and publishing landscapes of the period in search of a paycheck, writing everything from potboilers to ad copy. Julian was consistently short of funds because--as biographer Gary Scharnhorst is the first to reveal--he was supporting two households: his wife in one and a longtime mistress in the other.

The younger Hawthorne''s name and work ethic gave him influence in spite of his haphazard writing. Julian helped to found Cosmopolitan and Collier''s Weekly. As a Hearst stringer, he covered some of the era''s most important events: McKinley''s assassination, the Galveston hurricane, and the Spanish-American War, among others.

When Julian died at age 87, he had written millions of words and more than 3,000 pieces, out-publishing his father by a ratio of twenty to one. Gary Scharnhorst, after his own long career including works on Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and other famous writers, became fascinated by the leaps and falls of Julian Hawthorne. This biography shows why.

The Scarlet Letter is virtually unique among works of American fiction because it has not lapsed from print in over 140 years. The history of its reception, which is fully articulated in the volume introduction, may be read as a case study in canon formation. The collection of documents in the volume outline the highs and lows of Nathaniel Hawthorne's literary reputation and the elevation of his first and best-known romance to the rank of masterpiece and classic. Also included is a selective bibliography of modern scholarship.Among the early documents reprinted are contemporary news accounts of Hawthorne's dismissal from the Salem Custom House in June 1849, which provide the immediate background to The Custom House introduction in the story, the publisher James T. Fields's anecdotal version of the book's composition history, and a generous sheaf of notices from both American and British newspapers upon its publication in March, 1850. Of special value are the various essays and other materials that trace the institutionalization of the romance within the genteel tradition of American letters in the late nineteenth century. More recently, The Scarlet Letter has become something of an academic shibboleth, inspiring dozens of New Critical, psychoanalytical, feminist, and other readings, which are also represented in this collection. Prominent among modern critics whose essays appear are Neal Frank Doubleday, Darrel Abel, and Nina Baym. A number of reviews of theatrical and cinematic adaptations of the story also underscore its stature as a cultural icon. This volume is essential for serious research on Nathaniel Hawthorne and provides a convenient body of valuable commentary accessible even to the student reading The Scarlet Letter for the first time.

This is a comprehensive collection of authentic recipes, some 500 in all, for drinks and dishes that more than 150 American authors since the late 18th century are known to have enjoyed. The book should appeal to amateur chefs and so-called "foodies" who may want to test some of the recipes in their kitchens; to American literature instructors and scholars who may use it as a teaching tool; and general readers who will read it for pleasure. In effect, this is a celebrity cookbook to which many literary celebrities, living and dead, have contributed, among them Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rudolfo Anaya, Denise Chavez, Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, Harlan Ellison, Ursula Le Guin, Benjamin Franklin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Jack London, Allen Ginsberg, Lafcadio Hearn, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Elmore Leonard, Bobbie Ann Mason, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gertrude Stein, Onoto Watanna, Eudora Welty, Walt Whitman, and Gerald Vizenor.

Bret Harte was the best-known and highest-paid writer in America in the early 1870s, yet his vexed attempts to earn a living by his pen led to the failure of his marriage and, in 1878, his departure for Europe. Gary Scharnhorst's biography of Harte traces the growing commercial appeal of western fiction and drama on both sides of the Atlantic during the Gilded Age, a development in which Harte played a crucial role.Harte's pioneering use of California local color in such stories as ""The Outcasts of Poker Flat"" challenged genteel assumptions about western writing and helped open eastern papers to contributions by Mark Twain and others. The popularity of Bret Harte's writings was driven largely by a literary market that his western stories helped create.The first Harte biography in nearly seventy years to be written entirely from primary sources, this book documents Harte's personal relationships and, in addition, his negotiations with various publishers, agents, and theatrical producers as he exploited popular interest in the American West.

Westerns are rarely only about the West. From the works of James Fenimore Cooper to Gary Cooper, stories set in the American West have served as vehicles for topical commentary. More than any other pioneer of the genre, Owen Wister turned the Western into a form of social and political critique, touching on such issues as race, the environment, women’s rights, and immigration. In Owen Wister and the West, a biographical-literary account of Wister’s life and writings, Gary Scharnhorst shows how the West shaped Wister’s career and ideas, even as he lived and worked in the East.The Virginian, Wister’s claim to literary fame, was published in 1902, but his writing career actually began in 1891 and continued for twenty-five years after the publication of his masterpiece. Scharnhorst traces Wister’s western connections up to and through the publication of The Virginian and shows that the author remained deeply connected to the American West until his death in 1938. Like his Harvard friend Theodore Roosevelt, Wister was the sickly scion of an eastern family who recuperated in the West before returning to his home and inherited social position. His life story is punctuated with appearances by such contemporaries as Frederic Remington, Rudyard Kipling, and Ernest Hemingway.Scharnhorst thoroughly discusses Wister’s experiences in the West, including a detailed chronology of his travels and the writings that grew out of them. He offers numerous insights into Wister’s adroit use of sources, and provides revealing comparisons between Wister’s western works and the writings of other authors treating the same region.The West, Scharnhorst shows, was the crucible in which Wister tested and expressed his political opinions, most of them startlingly conservative by present standards. Yet The Virginian remains the template for the western novel today. More than any other Western writer of the past century and a half, Wister's career merits resurrection.

New in Paperback! Gilman (1860-1935), best known today for "The Yellow Wall-paper" and Women and Economics and a prolific writer, was virtually forgotten until the 1970s. Even now her publications are still largle inaccessible, and this first comprehensive bibliography traces the original appearances of her works, their republications, and their translations. Cloth edition published in 1985.

Kate Field was among the first celebrity journalists. A literary and cultural sensation, she reported the news while frequently becoming news herself because of her sharp wit and vibrant presence. She wrote for several prestigious newspapers, such as the ""Boston Post"", ""Chicago Tribune"", and ""New York Herald"", as well her own ""Kate Field's Washington"". Field's friends and professional acquaintances included Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot. Legendary novelist Henry James patterned the character of Henrietta Stackpole after her in ""The Portrait of a Lady"".In this eloquent and immensely readable biography, Gary Scharnhorst offers a fascinating, often poignant portrait of a fiercely intelligent and enormously independent woman who contributed significantly to America's intellectual and social life in the late nineteenth century. Kate Field was an outspoken advocate for the rights of black Americans and founder of the first women's club in America. She campaigned to make Yosemite a national park and saved John Brown's Adirondack farm for the nation. Field's activities will interest students and scholars of nineteenth-century American literature, women's studies, and journalism, as well as patrons of public and academic libraries.

Prominent American author, lecturer, and social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) is best known for her 1898 treatise Women and Economics, which traced gender inequality to women’s economic dependence upon men, and for her 1892 short story ""The Yellow Wall-Paper,"" which depicts a woman’s descent into madness. However, she began her career as a poet. Her first authored book, a collection of verse entitled In This Our World, was issued in four different editions between 1893 and 1898. While virtually all of Gilman’s later poems appeared in her monthly magazine, The Forerunner (1909–1916), or in The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1996), Gilman’s early verse has been largely inaccessible to modern readers, and dozens of her poems have never been collected. This volume, co-edited by Scharnhorst and Knight, includes all 149 poems in the 1898 edition of In This Our World as well as 79 vagrant poems that appeared in a variety of newspapers and magazines. This critical volume features a comprehensive introduction, appendixes, and extensive notes. Gilman devotees and a new generation of readers will find this edition an indispensable resource.

Prominent American author, lecturer, and social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) is best known for her 1898 treatise Women and Economics, which ascribed gender inequality to women’s economic dependence upon men, and for her 1892 short story "The Yellow Wall-Paper," which depicts a woman’s descent into madness. However, she began her career as a poet. Her first authored book, a collection of verse entitled In This Our World, was issued in four different editions between 1893 and 1898. While virtually all of Gilman’s later poems appeared in her monthly magazine, The Forerunner (1909–16), or in The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1996), Gilman’s early verse has been largely inaccessible to modern readers, and dozens of her poems have never been collected. This volume, coedited by Scharnhorst and Knight, includes all 149 poems in the 1898 edition of In This Our World as well as 112 vagrant poems that appeared in a variety of newspapers and magazines. This critical volume features a comprehensive introduction and extensive notes. Gilman devotees and a new generation of readers will find this edition an indispensable resource.

The great writer’s irascible wit shines in this comprehensive collection Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews is an annotated and indexed scholarly edition of every known interview with Mark Twain. In these interviews that span his entire career, Twain discusses matters as varied as his lecture style, his writings, and his bankruptcy, while holding forth on such timeless issues as human nature, politics, war and peace, government corruption, humor, race relations, imperialism, international copyright, the elite, and his impressions of other writers. These interviews are oral performances in their own right and a new basis for evaluating contemporary responses to Twain’s writings. The interviews are records of verbal conversations rather than texts written in Twain’s hand. Four interviews are new to scholarship; fewer than a fifth have ever been reprinted. .    

The first book-length treatment of Mark Twain’s public persona as depicted in newspaper and magazine illustrationsCartoons and Caricatures of Mark Twain: Reformer and Social Critic, 1869–1910 reproduces for students and scholars of Twain and American literature a provocative series of visual texts that illustrate the growth of Twain’s reputation as a social and political satirist. Myrick and Scharnhorst trace the evolution of Twain’s depiction across more than forty years and seventy illustrations—from portrayals of the famous author as a court jester adorned with cap and bells, to a regally haloed king with a royal train—offering a new perspective on his influence. Although he was among the most photographed figures of the nineteenth century, Myrick and Scharnhorst focus on a medium that Twain, a genius of self-promotion and an expert at brand management, could not control. As a result, Myrick and Scharnhorst have compiled an innovative and incisive type of reception history.This initial volume of Cartoons and Caricatures of Mark Twain emphasizes Twain’s reputation as a political satirist. It illustrates the popular response to many famous and infamous episodes in his career, such as the storm of controversy that surrounded the publication of his anti-imperialist writings at the turn of the twentieth century. Routinely depicted with hair like a fright wig, a beak-like nose, and a cigar in hand, no matter the context or the costume, Twain was not only the greatest writer in American literary history but perhaps the most iconic figure in American popular culture.

Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews is an annotated and indexed scholarly edition of every known interview with Mark Twain. In these interviews that span his entire career, Twain discusses matters as varied as his lecture style, his writings, and his bankruptcy, while holding forth on such timeless issues as human nature, politics, war and peace, government corruption, humour, race relations, imperialism, international copyright, the elite, and his impressions of other writers.These interviews are oral performances in their own right and a new basis for evaluating contemporary responses to Twain’s writings. The interviews are records of verbal conversations rather than texts written in Twain’s hand. Four interviews are new to scholarship; fewer than a fifth have ever been reprinted.

The first book-length treatment of Mark Twain’s public persona as depicted in newspaper and magazine illustrationsCartoons and Caricatures of Mark Twain: Reformer and Social Critic, 1869–1910 reproduces for students and scholars of Twain and American literature a provocative series of visual texts that illustrate the growth of Twain’s reputation as a social and political satirist. Myrick and Scharnhorst trace the evolution of Twain’s depiction across more than forty years and seventy illustrations—from portrayals of the famous author as a court jester adorned with cap and bells, to a regally haloed king with a royal train—offering a new perspective on his influence. Although he was among the most photographed figures of the nineteenth century, Myrick and Scharnhorst focus on a medium that Twain, a genius of self-promotion and an expert at brand management, could not control. As a result, Myrick and Scharnhorst have compiled an innovative and incisive type of reception history.This initial volume of Cartoons and Caricatures of Mark Twain emphasizes Twain’s reputation as a political satirist. It illustrates the popular response to many famous and infamous episodes in his career, such as the storm of controversy that surrounded the publication of his anti-imperialist writings at the turn of the twentieth century. Routinely depicted with hair like a fright wig, a beak-like nose, and a cigar in hand, no matter the context or the costume, Twain was not only the greatest writer in American literary history but perhaps the most iconic figure in American popular culture.

Sinclair Lewis Remembered is a collection of reminiscences and memoirs by contemporaries, friends, and associates of Lewis that offers a revealing and intimate portrait of this complex and significant Nobel Prize–winning American writer.

After a troubled career as a student at Yale, Sinclair Lewis turned to literature as his livelihood, publishing numerous works of popular fiction that went unnoticed by critics. With the 1920s, however, came Main Street, Lewis’s first critical success, which was soon followed by Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Elmer Gantry, and Dodsworth—five of the most influential social novels in the history of American letters, all written within one decade.   Nevertheless, Lewis’s Nobel Prize for Literature in 1930 led to controversy. Writers such as Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, and Thomas Mann expressed their dissent with the decision. Unable to match his previous success, Lewis suffered from alcoholism, alienated colleagues, and embraced unpopular political positions. The nadir for Lewis’s literary reputation was Mark Schorer’s 1961 biography, Sinclair Lewis: An American Life, which helped to legitimize the dismissal of Lewis’s entire body of work.   Recent scholarly research has seen a resurgence of interest in Lewis and his writings. The multiple and varied perspectives found in Sinclair Lewis Remembered, edited by Gary Scharnhorst and Matthew Hofer, illustrate uncompromised glimpses of a complicated writer who should not be forgotten. The more than 115 contributions to this volume include reminiscences by Upton Sinclair, Edna Ferber, Alfred Harcourt, Samuel Putnam, H. L. Mencken, John Hersey, Hallie Flanagan, and many others.

The first book-length treatment of Mark Twain’s public persona as depicted in newspaper and magazine illustrations   Cartoons and Caricatures of Mark Twain in Context: Reformer and Social Critic, 1869–1910 examines the production, reception, and history of Twain’s reputation as a social and political satirist. Myrick and Scharnhorst trace the evolution of Twain’s depiction throughout his life, career, and even death and across more than seventy illustrations—from portrayals of the famous author as a court jester adorned with cap and bells, to a regally haloed king with a royal train—offering a new perspective on his influence and reputation. Although he was among the most photographed figures of the nineteenth century, Myrick and Scharnhorst focus on a medium that Twain, an expert ofself-promotion and brand management, could not control. As a result, Myrick and Scharnhorst have compiled an innovative and incisive visual reception history. Cartoons and Caricatures of Mark Twainin Context illustrates the popular and often critical response to many famous and infamous episodes in his career, such as the storm of controversy that surrounded the publication of his anti-imperialist writings at the turn of the twentieth century. Routinely depicted with hair like a fright wig, a beak-like nose, and a cigar in hand, no matter the context or the costume, Twain was instantly recognizable. Yet it was not merely the familiarity of his image that made him a regular feature in visual commentary, but also his willingness to speak out against corruption and to insert himself into controversies of his day.

This book begins the first multi-volume biography of Samuel Clemens to appear in over a century. In the succeeding years, Clemens biographers have either tailored their narratives to fit the parameters of a single volume or focused on a particular period or aspect of Clemens’s life, because the whole of that epic life cannot be compressed into a single volume. In The Life of Mark Twain, Gary Scharnhorst has chosen to write a complete biography plotted from beginning to end, from a single point of view, on an expansive canvas. With dozens of Mark Twain biographies available, what is left unsaid? On average, a hundred Clemens letters and a couple of Clemens interviews surface every year. Scharnhorst has located documents relevant to Clemens’s life in Missouri, along the Mississippi River, and in the West, including some which have been presumed lost. Over three volumes, Scharnhorst elucidates the life of arguably the greatest American writer and reveals the alchemy of his gifted imagination.

The last installment of Scharnhorst’s three-volume biography chronicles the life of Samuel Clemens between his family’s extended trip to Europe in 1891 and his death in 1910. During this period, Clemens was one of the most famous people in the world. He also grapples with bankruptcy, returns to the lecture circuit, loses two daughters and his wife, and writes some of his darkest, most critical works in the last years of his life.

This three-volume, hardcover set of Gary Scharnhorst's biography of Samuel Clemens includes The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835-1871; The Life of Mark Twain: The Middle Years, 1871-1891; and The Life of Mark Twain: The Final Years, 1891-1910.

Vital Issues presents an annotated scholarly edition of the weekly columns Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the most prominent American feminist intellectual during the early twentieth century, contributed in 1904 to the Boston Woman's Journal, the leading journal of the US woman's movement.At the height of her career in 1904, Charlotte Perkins Gilman contributed dozens of essays to the Boston Woman's Journal, ""the only Voice of the Woman's Movement in this country, if not the world,"" as she later declared. Gilman aimed to transform ""the whole woman movement"" because she believed the right to vote was a necessary but insufficient goal. Her weekly column presumed that ""the woman's movement is larger than the suffrage movement and includes it; and that the very cause to which this paper is devoted will be most advanced by a more inclusive treatment.""These essays silhouette the foundations of her feminism and anticipate much of her subsequent writing.

Vital Issues presents an annotated scholarly edition of the weekly columns Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the most prominent American feminist intellectual during the early twentieth century, contributed in 1904 to the Boston Woman's Journal, the leading journal of the US woman's movement.At the height of her career in 1904, Charlotte Perkins Gilman contributed dozens of essays to the Boston Woman's Journal, ""the only Voice of the Woman's Movement in this country, if not the world,"" as she later declared. Gilman aimed to transform ""the whole woman movement"" because she believed the right to vote was a necessary but insufficient goal. Her weekly column presumed that ""the woman's movement is larger than the suffrage movement and includes it; and that the very cause to which this paper is devoted will be most advanced by a more inclusive treatment.""These essays silhouette the foundations of her feminism and anticipate much of her subsequent writing.

Mark Twain's life as told by more than 200 contemporaries including Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, and many more.A master storyteller, Mark Twain inspired his friends, family, fellow authors, and others to reminisce about him at every stage of his life and everywhere he lived. In Mark Twain Remembered: An Anecdotal Biography, Gary Scharnhorst transcribes and annotates over two hundred memoirs by people who knew Twain personally—boyhood friends in Hannibal; family members; mining partners and fellow journalists in Nevada and California; neighbors in Hartford and New York. Commentaries from editors, publishers, lecture managers, and politicians of all stripes—from Prime Ministers and Presidents to grassroots activists—grace these pages. Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Jean Webster, Maxim Gorky, Ambrose Bierce, Booker T. Washington, and P. T. Barnum are all heard from. The greatness of these recollections are the breadth of experience, intimacy, and depth of understanding from Twain’s contemporaries, notable and otherwise.These anecdotes chronicle Twain’s brief service in a Missouri militia during the Civil War; his residences in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, London, and Florence; his campaigns against colonialism in Africa and Asia and US imperialism in the Philippines; his advocacy for international copyright; his opinions on issues of race and ethnicity; and his triumphant trip to England to receive an honorary doctoral degree from Oxford University in 1907. This mosaic of his life should interest general readers, teachers of Twain’s writings, and specialists in American literature.

Mark Twain's life as told by more than 200 contemporaries including Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, and many more. A master storyteller, Mark Twain inspired his friends, family, fellow authors, and others to reminisce about him at every stage of his life and everywhere he lived. In Mark Twain Remembered: An Anecdotal Biography, Gary Scharnhorst transcribes and annotates over two hundred memoirs by people who knew Twain personally—boyhood friends in Hannibal; family members; mining partners and fellow journalists in Nevada and California; neighbors in Hartford and New York. Commentaries from editors, publishers, lecture managers, and politicians of all stripes—from Prime Ministers and Presidents to grassroots activists—grace these pages. Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Jean Webster, Maxim Gorky, Ambrose Bierce, Booker T. Washington, and P. T. Barnum are all heard from. The greatness of these recollections are the breadth of experience, intimacy, and depth of understanding from Twain’s contemporaries, notable and otherwise. These anecdotes chronicle Twain’s brief service in a Missouri militia during the Civil War; his residences in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, London, and Florence; his campaigns against colonialism in Africa and Asia and US imperialism in the Philippines; his advocacy for international copyright; his opinions on issues of race and ethnicity; and his triumphant trip to England to receive an honorary doctoral degree from Oxford University in 1907. This mosaic of his life should interest general readers, teachers of Twain’s writings, and specialists in American literature.

Mark Twain's life as told by more than 200 contemporaries including Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, and many more.A master storyteller, Mark Twain inspired his friends, family, fellow authors, and others to reminisce about him at every stage of his life and everywhere he lived. In Mark Twain Remembered: An Anecdotal Biography, Gary Scharnhorst transcribes and annotates over two hundred memoirs by people who knew Twain personallyboyhood friends in Hannibal; family members; mining partners and fellow journalists in Nevada and California; neighbors in Hartford and New York. Commentaries from editors, publishers, lecture managers, and politicians of all stripesfrom Prime Ministers and Presidents to grassroots activistsgrace these pages. Teddy Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Jean Webster, Maxim Gorky, Ambrose Bierce, Booker T. Washington, and P. T. Barnum are all heard from. The greatness of these recollections are the breadth of experience, intimacy, and depth of understanding from Twain's contemporaries, notable and otherwise.These anecdotes chronicle Twain's brief service in a Missouri militia during the Civil War; his residences in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, London, and Florence; his campaigns against colonialism in Africa and Asia and US imperialism in the Philippines; his advocacy for international copyright; his opinions on issues of race and ethnicity; and his triumphant trip to England to receive an honorary doctoral degree from Oxford University in 1907. This mosaic of his life should interest general readers, teachers of Twain's writings, and specialists in American literature.