Twentieth century views

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, or Mark Twain, as he was better known, was born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, the sixth child of John Marshall and Jane Lampton Clemens. His father ran a dry goods and grocery store, practiced law, and involved himself in local politics after the family's move to Hannibal, Missouri, when Sam was four years old.Hannibal seems to have been a good place for a boy to grow up. Sam was entranced by the Mississippi River and enjoyed both the barges and the people who traveled on them. When Sam was just eleven his father died and Sam went to work for his brother at the Hannibal Journal first as a printer's apprentice and later a compositor. While still in his teens Sam went on the road as an itinerant printer. In 1857 he conceived a plan to seek his fortune in South America but on the way he met a steamboat captain, Horace Bixby who took him on as a cub riverboat pilot and taught him until he acquired his own license.This enjoyable style of life, which Twain always spoke of later with special warmth, was ended by the Civil War. Twain went West with his brother Orion to prospect in Nevada but in 1862 joined the staff of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, a paper to which he had already begun submitting his work. Later Twain went to California and submitted "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" to the New York Saturday Press.By 1871 Twain had published Innocents Abroad and had married Olivia Langdon, the sister of a friend from a socially-prominent New York City family. He and his wife moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where they made their family home for the next 20 years.Books that he wrote in Hartford confirmed his popular reputation but despite their success Twain found himself in financial difficulty primarily because of his investments in the Paige typesetting business as well as his own publishing company. Eventually Twain was forced to declare bankruptcy.Twain's last major books were successful commercially but they also reflected his increasing pessimism. His satire became at times more biting and mean-spirited than humorous. Despite the downturn in Twain's outlook in later life and despite the unevenness of much of his work, he remains one of the major writers of the American nineteenth century, and one who has been enormously influential on subsequent writers.Get to know the man who revolutionized American literature in this three-volume biography. World Digital Library also offers eBook editions of Mark Twain’s works for your reading enjoyment.

"In the fall of 1849, Herman Melville traveled to London to deliver his novel White-Jacket to his publisher. On his return to America, Melville would write Moby-Dick. Melville: A Novel imagines what happened in between: the adventurous writer fleeing London for the country, wrestling with an angel, falling in love with an Irish nationalist, and, finally, meeting the angel's challenge--to express man's fate by writing the novel that would become his masterpiece. Eighty years after it appeared in English, Moby-Dick was translated into French for the first time by the Provençal novelist Jean Giono and his friend Lucien Jacques. The publisher persuaded Giono to write a preface, granting him unusual latitude. The result was this literary essai, Melville: A Novel--part biography, part philosophical rumination, part romance, part unfettered fantasy"--Page 4 of cover.

Includes selections by the editors; a chronology of important dates and a bibliography.

The view of the new British theater that this book gives, from numerous vantage points, is centered on those works of John Osborne, Harold Pinter, John Arden, and Arnold Wesker that were written in the nineteen-fifties and the first half of the sixties. These studies represent the best of the sustained critical comment.

A collection of essays on the playwright's work by such critics as Herbert Blau and Robert Warshow offers an analysis of Miller's achievements.

A collection of essays on Shaw's artistry in using the drama to project his intense social and political convictions.

Alan Ayckbourn - Edward Bond - Bertolt Brecht - Sasmuel Beckett - David Edgar - David Hare - Frederich Nietzche - Joe Orton - Harold Pinter; Peter Shaffer - George Bernard Sahw - Tom Stoppard - Oscar Wilde.