Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Letters from the Earth is a collection of short stories written during a downtrodden period in Twain's life and published posthumously. Here we see Twain on a somewhat personal level. Penniless and having just lost his wife and one of his children, Twain turns to writing about God, Christianity, and the many curious natures of man. This collection was so controversial that his daughter prohibited its publication until 52 years after his death. "Twain sentimentalists will gasp, Bible-belters will turn purple, austere stylistic purists will raise eyebrows--but dyed-in-the-wool Twain enthusiasts will grab hungrily for what amounts to a new volume by the 'Lincoln of our literature.' ...The pages in this volume range from furious to funny, from deadly earnestness to frothy wordplay."--Library Journal
About the Author
Samuel Langhorne Clemenswas born on November 30, 1835, in the village of Florida, Missouri. He attended the ordinary western common school until he was twelve, the last of his formal schooling. He became a typesetter and began work on his brother's Hannibal newspaper, publishing his first humorous sketch in 1851. During the next fifteen years he was successively a steamboat pilot, a soldier for three weeks, a silver miner, a newspaper reporter, and a bohemian in San Francisco known as "Mark Twain." At no time during these years did he seriously entertain a career in literature. But in 1865, deeply in debt, he acknowledged a talent for "literature, of a low order, i.e., humorous." In the next forty years, he published more than a dozen books and hundreds of shorter works, including his masterpiece in 1885, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn".Carl Reiner, a comedian, actor, novelist, and film director, was a creator, writer, and producer of "The Dick Van Dyke Show." In 1999, he was awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American humor by the Kennedy Center and inducted into the Television Hall of Fame by the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. He most recently appeared in "Ocean's Eleven" and "Ocean's Twelve." He lives in Beverly Hills, California.