Twain's End
Title | Twain's End PDF eBook |
Author | Lynn Cullen |
Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
Pages | 368 |
Release | 2016-06-07 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1476758972 |
"In March of 1909, Mark Twain cheerfully blessed the wedding of his private secretary, Isabel V. Lyon, and his business manager, Ralph Ashcroft. One month later, he fired both, wrote a ferocious 429-page rant about the pair, and then --with his daughter, Clara Clemens--slandered Isabel in the newspapers, erasing her nearly seven years of devoted service to their family."--Page 4 of cover
Dangerous Intimacy
Title | Dangerous Intimacy PDF eBook |
Author | Karen Lystra |
Publisher | Univ of California Press |
Pages | 382 |
Release | 2004-04-23 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0520940377 |
The last phase of Mark Twain's life is sadly familiar: Crippled by losses and tragedies, America's greatest humorist sank into a deep and bitter depression. It is also wrong. This book recovers Twain's final years as they really were—lived in the shadow of deception and prejudice, but also in the light of the author's unflagging energy and enthusiasm. Dangerous Intimacy relates the story of how, shortly after his wife's death in 1904, Twain basked in the attentions of Isabel Lyon, his flirtatious—and calculating—secretary. Lyon desperately wanted to marry her boss, who was almost thirty years her senior. She managed to exile Twain's youngest daughter, Jean, who had epilepsy. With the help of Twain's assistant, Ralph Ashcroft, who fraudulently acquired power of attorney over the author's finances, Lyon nearly succeeded in assuming complete control over Twain's life and estate. Fortunately, Twain recognized the plot being woven around him just in time. So rife with twists and turns as to defy belief, the story nonetheless comes to undeniable, vibrant life in the letters and diaries of those who witnessed it firsthand: Katy the housekeeper, Jean, Lyon, and others whose own distinctive, perceptive, often amusing voices take us straight into the heart of the Clemens household. Just as Twain extricated himself from the lies, prejudice, and self-delusion that almost turned him into an American Lear, so Karen Lystra liberates the author's last decade from a century of popular misunderstanding. In this gripping book we at last see how, late in life, this American icon discovered a deep kinship with his youngest child and continued to explore the precarious balance of love and pain that is one of the trademarks of his work.
Mark Twain's Other Woman
Title | Mark Twain's Other Woman PDF eBook |
Author | Laura Skandera Trombley |
Publisher | Vintage |
Pages | 353 |
Release | 2011-03-08 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 0307474941 |
Laura Skandera Trombley, the preeminent Twain scholar at work today, reveals the never-before-read letters and daily journals of Isabel Lyon, Mark Twain’s last personal secretary. For six years, Isabel Lyon was responsible for running the aging Man in White’s chaotic household, nursing him through several illnesses and serving as his adoring audience. But after a dramatic breakup of their relationship, Twain ranted in personal letters that she was “a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, a drunkard, a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator, a filthy-minded and salacious slut pining for seduction.” For decades, biographers omitted Isabel from the official Twain history at his decree. But now, the truth of the split is exposed at last in a story that sheds light on a lionized author’s final decade.
Mark Twain's Autobiography
Title | Mark Twain's Autobiography PDF eBook |
Author | Mark Twain |
Publisher | |
Pages | 398 |
Release | 1924 |
Genre | |
ISBN |
Mark Twain's Book for Bad Boys and Girls
Title | Mark Twain's Book for Bad Boys and Girls PDF eBook |
Author | Mark Twain |
Publisher | M J F Books |
Pages | 196 |
Release | 2002-07 |
Genre | Humor |
ISBN | 9781567315318 |
This is the first-ever compilation of Twain's wise and witty essays, sketches, and stories on the joys and rewards of misbehavior. With themes including "honesty is not always the best policy, ""the wicked are not always punished," and "virtue is often its only reward," this is a charming treasury that will warm the hearts of bad boys and girls (of any age)everywhere
Mrs. Poe
Title | Mrs. Poe PDF eBook |
Author | Lynn Cullen |
Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
Pages | 336 |
Release | 2013-10 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 1476702918 |
Struggling to support her family in mid-19th-century New York, writer Frances Osgood makes an unexpected connection with literary master Edgar Allan Poe and finds her survival complicated by her intense attraction to the writer and the scheming manipulations of his wife.
No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger
Title | No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger PDF eBook |
Author | Mark Twain |
Publisher | Univ of California Press |
Pages | 216 |
Release | 2011-02-05 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 0520270002 |
Originally published: Berkeley, Calif; London: University of California Press, 1969.