[Mark Twain] is still the rough, awkward, good-natured boy who swore at the deck hands when he was three years old. Thoroughly lik...eable as a good fellow, but impossible as a man of letters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Write about winter in the summer. Describe Norway as Ibsen did, from a desk in Italy; describe Dublin as James Joyce did, from a d...esk in Paris. Willa Cather wrote her prairie novels in New York City; Mark Twain wrote Huckleberry Finn in Hartford, Connecticut. Recently, scholars learned that Walt Whitman rarely left his room.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
And his wish is intimacy, Intimater intimacy,... And a stricter privacy; The impossible shall yet be done, And, being two, shall still be one. As the wave breaks to foam on shelves, Then runs into a wave again, So lovers melt their sundered selves, Yet melted would be twain.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
God, who gave to him the lyre, Of all mortals the desire,... For all breathing men's behoof, Straitly charged him, "Sit aloof;" Annexed a warning, poets say, To the bright premium,-- Ever, when twain together play, Shall the harp be dumb.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mark Twain didn't psychoanalyze Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. Dickens didn't put Oliver Twist on the couch because he was hungry! Good ...copy comes out of people, Johnny, not out of a lot of explanatory medical terms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In many ways, Twain and Waugh were strikingly similar. Even within the group of great humorists, they belong together. Both anti-e...rotic imaginations, they stress male comradeships and represent love-relationships most conventionally and sentimentally. They both show society as dominated by fools and bores, and fate as characterized by betrayal and disaster--life as subordinate to death. For that reason, no doubt, both are much interested in militarism and the machinery of death, as well as in the military and manly virtues. Both men tell jokes that belong to the bar where magistrates gather, managers, captains, men who take responsibility for law and order. Both were quickly irritated by most real clubs and bars. One might say that both belonged to the same cultural type.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.... American writing comes from that. The...re was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgeme...nt Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Except for the beast fables, which are anciently derived from the world's multi-racial heritage, American Negro humor is rooted in... social oppression. And--again excepting the animal fables--it differs from classical Western and white American humor in another respect. It is totally devoid of those myth-making and myth-transmuting elements and symbols that appeal so deeply to the American mind in the works of the tall-tale tellers such as Davy Crockett, Seba Smith, Mike Fink, and Mark Twain. There are no Rip Van Winkles, Johnny Appleseeds, Paul Bunyans, or Calamity Janes--and none bearing the faintest resemblance to them--in Negro American humor. The myth-making figures in the literature of black Americans are the blues-haunted characters. They are Stagolee, John Henry, and Big Boy; they are Mary Lou, Frankie, and Sister Caroline. And they are not funny, least of all to the nameless hundreds of folk-Negroes who created them and the still-living thousands who love them and perpetuate them in song and story.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »