The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

This book gave birth to the term "gilded age" to cover the last part of the 19th century. It was co-written by two authors and thus has a few distinct threads. At this time, everyone is out to get rich by whatever means possible. Speculation is the name of the game. The government was more a way of dispensing pork than actual governing. Washington D.C. gets especially pillared in the book. Who would dare think anything could be achieved by merrit? One girl tries to go to Washington to help get the government to invest in a plot of land she has. She lobbies hard and even murders a senator. She is later acquitted based on insanity, and then allowed to live her life. Another thread is about a man trying to make a fortune on a coal mine. Everyone likes him, but they just can't find it. Finally they give up and he works without pay with a loyalist before finally striking it rich.  While the plot gets a bit confusing, the satire is heavy hitting. Greed and corruption seem to hidden around every corner.

The Innocents Abroad: Or, The New Pilgrim’s Progress

The Innocents Abroad: Or, The New Pilgrim’s Progress by Mark Twain

Mark Twain went on a trip with a group of Americans to visit the Holy Land and many places in between. Twain's wit and humour make for one of the better travel stories. The trip and the actions of everyone involved are more important than the actual site. The profiteering of the locals is critisized outright, while the naive behavior of Americans gets criticized in passing. As an example, in Paris, the tour guide goes through great efforts to take them to so many different stores that it becomes too late to visit the museum they had asked to visit. The Americans naively believe they just needed to better instruct what they wanted to do. The Americans end up calling all guides by the same name.

When they finally get to the Holy Land, Twain is let down by the small scale of things. It is a small area and extremely impoverished. It was much less grand than he expected. It was difficult to comprehend a deity walking among the people.

Innocentes is an appropriate title. These people seem very innocent and naive. This adds to the humor as they explore historical parts of the world in a relatively clueless way. 

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

At the very end of the audiobook, it was called out as a librivox recording. Did they just filter out the internal annoying librivox disclaimers to make for a clean audiobook? It was much more listenable than a typical librivox. 

I couldn't help but have the Rush's Tom Sawyer go through my head as I listened to this book. The song doesn't have much to do with it other than the title.

In the story, Tom has a number of adventures. He is a dedicated slacker with a kind heart. When tasked with whitewashing a fence, he convinces others to pay him for the privilege of doing it.  He later accumulates tickets from Sunday School students and is able to claim a large prize when an official appears. (Alas, he had not learned what he was supposed to for getting the tickets and named David and Goliath as apostles.)

Some of the big adventures include witnessing a crime and later locating a treasure. Tom and his friend had some harrowing experiences and even faked their own death. (They were able to witness their own funeral.) They returned after hearing the details. The criminal was accidentally locked up. in a cave, leading to his death.

Despite being old, the book is very relatable to readers today, though I imagine people would cringe at some of the language being offensively racist. (However, the language was just what was commonly used and not used maliciously.) Tom is up to a lot of mischief, but is still caring and generally doesn't hurt people. He has some "naive" romance where he proposes "engagement" to a girl.

The Prince and the Pauper

The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain

This is one of the early "trading places" books. The Crown Prince of England, Eduard Tudor, looks very similar to a poor boy, Tom Canty. They meet together and notice the resemblance. They try on each others clothes for a brief experience as "the other". They then become separated and ushered into each others lives. They initially try to tell others about the switch, but nobody believes them. After some time, the poor boy gradually settles into the role of the prince. He decides to treat miscreants much more fairly. When the king dies, he is ready to be thrust into the role of king. He even once denies his family that he knows them. The prince struggles in his role as a poor boy. People do not believe that he is the prince. However, Tom's mother does see some differences and notices that he is not Tom. Eventually, they reunite at the time of coronation. Tom declares the prince as the real prince and reminds him where he hid the seal. He is properly coronated. Eduard is crowned and is able to serve a brief reign. Tom lives a long life of happiness. Who really did win? Twain shows that the fluke of birth, does provide advantages, but character can be important regardless of one's circumstances.

The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson

The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain

In the afterward, Twain mentions that this evolved as two stories. His initial focus was on two Italian twins. They later became minor characters as the book focuses on Pudd'nhead and Tom Driscoll. 

The book begins with Pudd'nhead. He went to a small town attempting to practice law. However, the people thought a joke he told made him sound stupid, so they declared him a Pudd'nhead and he could never get a law practice.

The story then pivots to Roxy and Tom Driscoll. Roxy is a slave that is 1/16th black. She has a child that is 1/32nd black that is born at the same time as her master's son. They look similar and she raises them together. One day she switches them. Her son ends up being raised as Tom Driscoll, while the master's son is raised as a slave. She is granted her freedom, but loses her savings in a bank failure. Her becomes an entitled man with a gambling problem who has little respect for her. She tries to ask for money from him, but resorts to blackmail to get it. Tom has lost most of his money and has resorted to stealing from townspeople. He often dressed as a woman to carry out the crimes.

Two Italian twins come to room in the town. They become famous in the town. However, they end up in conflict with Tom and his rich Uncle. Later Tom kills his uncle and frames the Italians. It seems a slam dunk case.

Then Pudd'nhead comes back into play and it turns into a crime book. He has collected fingerprints from his time in town. He is able to use this to match the fingerprint of Tom to the murder weapon. Furthermore, he identifies Tom's fingerprint as changing from his birth prints. He reveals that Tom is really the son of a slave.

The two boys switched as infants can now be returned to their true rolls. Alas, it doesn't work out well. Tom had spent his life as a slave and is illiterate. He cannot manage in white society. Meanwhile, black society shuns him since he is white. The slave boy was sentenced to prison. However, he was later restored to the estate as "property" and is sold down river.

The book shows the ludicrousness of long-term decisions based on short-term events. Wilson is forever a "Pudd'nhead" from one comment. "Single drop" race identification is fairly nonsense. With significant intermarriage it does not make sense to focus on single "races". Slavery based on race was destined to fail.

James: A Novel

James: A Novel by Percival Everett

This is the story of "Jim" from Huckleberry Finn. Most of the book deals with Jim on his own. However, it weaves in and out of his experiences with Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. Jim seeks out his own identity and tries to find his family. He becomes strong. He can read and write and knows how to talk like a "good slave" in addition to communicating with his strength. At times he hides in plain sight by pretending to be a white person in black face. He tries to find his family and commit some crimes in the process, including tying up a slave holder. The slaver's threats mean nothing to him as they have already tried to take his rights away. In the end, he declares himself "James" and moves on to freedom as the Civil War is going on. This book does a great job of exploring the life of slaves while providing an alternate view from a well-known book.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

Huck Finn is a buddy of Tom Sawyer. His dad is an absent drunkard, and Huck spends most of his life hopping around. He decides to run away and ends up rafting down the river with Jim, a runaway slave. Their adventures are a commentary of the issues and idiosyncrasies of southern life. Huck is torn between different societal values with Jim. He is "property" so he should be returned. He is also a "person" so should have his freedom. He also observes some seemingly well-to-do southerners that are involved in a huge feud that leads to them all dying. Later they run into grifters that declare themselves royalty. Huck plays along because it is not a big deal, even though he does not believe them. They have some more adventures. Later he ends up meeting with Tom and they work to free Jim, only for Huck later learn that Jim had already been freed. The end faded a bit from the quality of the main part, but it was pretty good. It is an interesting view of change of vocabulary offensiveness that the use of the n-word has lead to a lot of banning of this book, even though it was considered common use for a children's book during the day. 

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

I was tempted to knock this one down a notch due to the narrator's voice, but I stuck with an 8. This is a reread from one I read a long time ago. Somebody finds himself in the land of King Arthur. He is able to utilize some of his knowledge of events (such as an eclipse) as well as technology to his advantage. However, it is a struggle for the people to adopt what is good for them. He sees people convicted on supposition without a chance of defence. Nobles see nobility as more important than qualification. The yankee uses some subterfuge to work around people's ingrown behaviors for what he sees as their good. He eventually becomes involved in a duel with nights. He uses his lasso to capture a few knights. Then after it is taken, he shoots others with his gun. This leads towards the people to more willingly adopt his technology. However, a few years later, the church has come in to assert its power. 

The book is part a time travel tale of "modern" technology in the past. However, it is primarily a cultural critique. Even if societies have access to knowledge and technology that can improve them, they still have cultural inertia. This inertia can lead to them clinging to past behaviors that impede them from living in a modern society that would benefit them.

Life on the Mississippi

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

Mark Twain's writing is fresh and witty, even a century and half later. This is a memoir by Twain that focuses on his experiences on the Mississippi. Boats going between Cairo and New Orleans were a primary means of mobility in the pre-railroad era. They were so dominate, that a union of pilots could extract extremely high wages and salaries. This all came to an end when railroads and barges started plying the waters. 

He provides many insights of the river towns of the day. Near the end, he explores the "upper Mississippi" above St. Louis. These cities were growing quickly, from nothing to tens of thousands people. Great sunrises can be seen from cities like Muscatine. Railroad bridges now cross in multiple places. It is a study in technology and growth.

Twain includes historical background and personal experiences as well as many insights and observations. This is a great source of historical information as well as an entertaining read.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

[Retro from around 1991]

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is an excellent example of Mark Twain's humorous style. His humor, coupled with his satire make this novel one of the best ever written.

Mark Twain's style is best exemplified by his humor and satire. Twain style allows him to place examples of the things that he loves in positions that require everyone to like them. He also uses his talents at satire to criticize his enemies in such a manner that sneaks past the readers realm of immediate recognition, to find a place of eternal dwelling inside their brain. From it's origin, the setting of this novel made it difficult for it to be anything but a comedy. But Even though there are many occasion in which Twain details serious occurrences, they are quickly followed up by humorous events.

Satire, too, is an integral part of Twain's style. The omnipotent Catholic church is one of Mark Twain's prime target of satire. Mark Twain is a strong believer in personal freedoms, thus he is against an established church. Twain's strong protestant beliefs are the background for his satire against the Roman Catholic church. He believes that the catholic church is not only teaching untruths, but is also destroying the lives of many innocent people. Through his satire, Twain portrays the church as a group of pit- bulls, ready to obey everything their master says, and destroy anyone that gets in their way.

The king, even though he is portrayed as a friend of the yankee, is one of Mark Twain's targets. Once as a freeman, the king is reduced to the less- than-average person that Twain believes all kings really are. Once his crown and cape are stripped from him, the king no longer has the great power that he had before. He is shown to lack some important skills, along with some basic farming knowledge that is common to all peasants. The king also is difficult to teach. Even with the extended coaching of the yankee concerning how a peasant should act, the king still reverted to his kingly ways.

Twain is also satirizes the beliefs of the middle age people. He is strongly against the middle age people's belief in magic rather than technology and facts. At the conclusion of the yankee's knightly trek to rescue princess, Sandy informs him that some pigs are actually princesses. Sandy, a typical middle age citizen, still believes that they are princesses, even though they are most certainly pigs. Finally, Twain's satire attacks the populace's resistance to change. Even with the great advancements that the yankee has given the people, they still revert back to their medieval war methods.

In the beginning, this Twain was set on creating a completely humorous novel, but gradually, he changed course, and ended up with a serious criticism of the period of King Arthur. Other than this minor flaw of inconsistency, Twain created a superb novel. In their works, Tennyson and Malory paint a picture of the middle ages being filled with brave, and almost god-like knights. On the other hand, Twain paints a picture of how life really was in the middle ages. He also allows common sense to prevail among his star character, the yankee. Instead of having him use dress in armor, and fight with medieval weapons, the yankee fights his duel wearing tights, and using modern weapons. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court one of the finest pieces of literature ever written.

Great Classic Stories 2

The ones that stuck out as being good in this collection were
Young Goodman Brown: He wanted to be good, but saw that everyone that he respected was in cohorts with the devil. It also made me wonder what happened to the deep religiousity form early New England. Will the other super religious areas change that way also?
How I Edited An Agricultural Paper: A great Mark Twain humor piece that I had not read before.
A Piece of String : A small thing ends up leading to dire consequences (watch out for strings!)
Head and Shoulders: life intervenes, and roles switch, with the academic's showgirl wife eventually attracting his past intellectual idol.
I didn't like Nuns at Luncheon or Cousin William.

The stories:
Young Goodman Brown (Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1835)
The Cask of Amontillado (Edgar Allan Poe, 1846)
Cousin William (Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1855)
How I Edited An Agricultural Paper (Mark Twain, 1870)
A Piece of String (Guy de Maupassant, 1883)
Angela, An Inverted Love Story (W.S. Gilbert, 1890)
Oh! The Public (Anton Chekhov, 1885)
The Nightingale and the Rose (Oscar Wilde, 1888)
The Story of an Hour (Kate Chopin, 1894)
A Coward (Edith Wharton, 1899)
A Jury of Her Peers (Susan Glaspell, 1917)
Araby (James Joyce, 1914)
The Mark on the Wall (Virginia Woolf, 1917)
The Interlopers (Saki, 1919)
Head and Shoulders (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1920)
The Stranger (Katherine Mansfield, 1921)
The Blind Man (D.H. Lawrence, 1922)
Nuns at Luncheon (Aldous Huxley, 1922)

The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories

The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg: And Other Stories by Mark Twain

Mark Twain has his own sense of humor. In the short story collection he can be a little more callous than he is in some of his more popular novels. He doesn't accept one bit of self-righteousness, and prefers the down-to-earth to the pompous. His characters emphasize that nobody is perfectly good or perfectly bad, and events can happen to people regardless of their disposition.

The stories included the following:

The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899)-- The town prides itself on being extremely honest. A traveler doesn't like this, and sets off a plan to corrupt them. He has a large sum of money for the man who "helped" him. The person is supposed to write a letter with the phrase that he uttered to help the man. The man then sends letters to each of the "big" men of the town mentioning this phrase as a means of testing their honesty. They all bite, and make a mockery of the town's honesty. However, the keeper withholds the letter from one man, saving him the embarrassment. However, this leads to that man having internal torment, and he ends up dying shortly thereafter. The town now had a negative reputation and eventually changed its name. Down with hypocrisy!

The celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County (1865) -- This was a lot shorter than I remembered.
The one million pound bank note -- A penniless man finds a million-pound bank note. Nobody can cash it, but everyone now treats him as wealthy. He amasses fame, but is conservative in the money he spends. Eventually, his notoriety allows him to earn real money and marry into wealth. (Is this anticipating celebrities whose only claim to fame is that they are famous?

 Edward Mills and George Benton : a tale (1880) -- One guy did good all his life. The other did bad. Every now and then, the bad guy would try to do good for a bit in order to reap the many benefits of society. He managed to amass many friends and others trying to help him. Eventually, the bad guy kills the good guy in a bank robbery. The good guy is fairly ignored, while everyone tries to help the bad guy. A century or two later, society still falls into the trap. We spend many resources on attempting to "reform" and "educate" those that have "chosen poorly". The occasional success story helps keep this going. Meanwhile, those that work hard and try to do good are pretty much ignored. (After all, they are doing what society wants, no need for society to expend resources.) As long as the "bad" make occasional presentations of good, they can continue on their debauchery.

The stolen white elephant (1882)-- Absurdist

Cannibalism in the cars (1868)-- Dark humour where people talk very formally about "who they will eat".

 The story of the good little boy -- Goes with the next one. Bad things happens to good people.

The story of the bad little boy (1865)-- ... and good things happen to bad people.

The man who put up at Gadsby's -- Don't recall much from this one.

Baker's blue jay yam : what stumped the blue jays -- This one didn't seem to stick either

A double barreled detective story (1902)-- This is a long story that involves Sherlock Holmes, a mistaken identity and a complicated revenge plot. About halfway through, the story changes from the "revenge" plot to Sherlock Holmes. I thought I might have accidentally gone on to the next story. However, at the end it finally all ties together.

Roughing It

Mark Twain published this travel book in 1872. Perhaps due to his use of humor, he was able to make observations that put him way ahead of his time. The premise is a supposed three month trip to Nevada that turns out being a multi-year exploration of the west. The trip was done long before interstates and airplanes, and even long before trains made the trip easy. (In one portion, he quotes a train travelogue to mock how easy the trip has become.) His journey was on horse-drawn stagecoach across the mostly undeveloped west. He has observations about the conditions of the plains and the mountains as well as the people that inhabit the area.

The first large civilized area that he encounters is Salt Lake City. He calls it the only true monarchy in America, and presents stories about Brigham Young and his "power" in the area. He had plans of trying to "expose" the Mormons. However, he came away with a fairly balanced view, which seemed much ahead of his time. He acknowledged that he would hear stories from "gentiles" about the Mormons that always seemed to have a different set of facts. He even took time to read the Book of Mormon, and quotes parts of it in his book. While he does manage to jumble a few facts of doctrine and history, his end opinion is to just let the people be. (He acknowledges that they are the hardest working people in the west, and free from most vices. And, being a humorist, he can get away with saying that the women are so comely, that the mean are doing a huge service by taking on multiple wives.)

For Indians, he also had a balanced view that was ahead of its times. Some Indians he would see as ridiculously lazy, in comparison to others that are hard working. He would also acknowledge some of their good attributes and compare them favorably to the "American" inhabitants. Similar positive treatment was given to other ethnic minorities such as the Chinese.

In fact, just about all his observations were presented well from both sides. Even when he seemed to be strongly opposed to something, he would present the other view, often using exaggeration for humor. About the only thing that I remember him taking a strong one-sided stand on was jury trial. He thought it was ridiculous that we try to field a jury of embacels that had never read about a case. Instead, we should have more upstanding citizens that could better dispense justice.

In Nevada he seemed to make and lose fortunes a few times. However, the consistent income he produced was working in journalism. Being a newspaperman he was regularly given "gifts" of interests in mines, often in response to his reporting. Even mention of a mine would often be enough to help drive up the share prices. (Seems a lot like the dot-com bubble.)

In addition to keen historical observation, Twain takes a turn at weather forecasting. San Francisco is 70 degrees year round. Precipitation, however, can be ascertained by looking at a calendar. 4 months of the year raining during the winter, and 8 months of sun during the summer. Sacramento, on the other hand is Summer year round.

Twain also made a voyage out to Hawaii. There he learned of the natives more laid back style (and regularly got cheated out of horse rentals.) He marveled at the natural wonders of the island, but spent more time describing the locals. White men were missionaries, sailors or government officials. The natives originally thought Captain Cook was a god and treated him royally. He, in return, abused them. When they realized he wasn't deity, they promptly executed him. Missionaries later came to clothe the natives and dissuade them from their crude traditions.

Eventually Twain returns home, ending an entertaining lesson in history and human behavior.