Mark Twain And Hawaii

"I went to Maui to stay a week and remained five. I had a jolly time. I would not have fooled away any of it writing letters under any consideration whatever." --Mark Twain So Samuel Langhorne Clemens made his excuse for late copy to the Sacramento Union, the newspaper that was underwriting his 1866 trip. If the young reporter's excuse makes perfect sense to you, join the thousands of Island lovers who have delighted in Twain's efforts when he finally did put pen to paper.

Mark Twain’s wit and wisdom is timeless. Mark Twain’s Hawaii: A Humorous Romp through History, combines Twain’s own writings on Hawaii with personal reminiscences by others who met him at that time, and traces Twain’s journey through the region just as he experienced it in 1866. The book highlights Twain’s humor, travel in the 19th century, history, social commentary, and the exotic locale in an authoritative and entertaining volume for Twain fans and Hawaii enthusiasts.

In the very last paragraph of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the title character gloomily reckons that it’s time “to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.” Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally is trying to “sivilize” him, and Huck Finn can’t stand it—he’s been there before. It’s a decision Huck’s creator already had made, albeit for somewhat different reasons, a quarter of a century earlier. He wasn’t even Mark Twain then, but as Huck might have said, “That ain’t no matter.” With the Civil War spreading across his native Missouri, twenty-five-year-old Samuel Clemens, suddenly out of work as a Mississippi riverboat pilot, gladly accepted his brother Orion’s offer to join him in Nevada Territory, far from the crimsoned battlefields of war. A rollicking, hilarious stagecoach journey across the Great Plains and over the Rocky Mountains was just the beginning of a nearly six-year-long odyssey that took Samuel Clemens from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Hawaii, with lengthy stopovers in Virginia City, Nevada, and San Francisco. By the time it was over, he would find himself reborn as Mark Twain, America’s best-loved, most influential writer. The “trouble,” as he famously promised, had begun. With a pitch-perfect blend of appreciative humor and critical authority, acclaimed literary biographer Roy Morris, Jr., sheds new light on this crucial but still largely unexamined period in Mark Twain’s life. Morris carefully sorts fact from fiction—never an easy task when dealing with Twain—to tell the story of a young genius finding his voice in the ramshackle mining camps, boomtowns, and newspaper offices of the wild and woolly West, while the Civil War rages half a continent away. With the frequent help of Twain’s own words, Morris follows his subject on a winding journey of selfdiscovery filled with high adventure and low comedy, as Clemens/Twain dodges Indians and gunfighters, receives marriage advice from Brigham Young, burns down a mountain with a frying pan, gets claim-jumped by rival miners, narrowly avoids fighting a duel, hikes across the floor of an active volcano, becomes one of the first white men to try the ancient Hawaiian sport of surfing, and writes his first great literary success, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Lighting Out for the Territory is a fascinating, even inspiring, account of how an unemployed riverboat pilot, would-be Confederate guerrilla, failed prospector, neophyte newspaper reporter, and parttime San Francisco aesthete reinvented himself as America’s most famous and beloved writer. It’s a good story, and mostly true—with some stretchers thrown in for good measure.

An anthology of pieces about the 50th state.

Most people, including literary biographers and other people who should know better, have a persistent image of Mark Twain as a dyspeptic geezer in a white suit, sourly regarding the world from a rocking chair on his New England porch. Not surprisingly, when Nigey Lennon’s groundbreaking biography, "The Sagebrush Bohemian", originally presented its startlingly irreverent revelations about Twain’s formative years, it aroused a firestorm of controversy. Previous Twain biographers had virtually ignored the pivotal period (1861-1869) during which Samuel Clemens migrated to the Western territory; learned the craft of writing in newspaper offices, saloons, and worse places; visited the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands; became a public speaker; adopted (or misappropriated) his famous monicker; and acquired his trademark moustache. Beneath its breezy, eminently readable surface, "The Sagebrush Bohemian" digests acres of primary sources to provide a penetrating, ribald, and hilarious look at the origins of Mark Twain, not to mention the Zeitgeist of the lusty and lawless era that produced him. “[The Sagebrush Bohemian] offers an efficient and lighthearted introduction to the years in which Sam Clemens transformed himself into the writer who made the American language and American irreverence the stuff of literature.” -- The New York Times Book Review “With great good humor, Lennon recounts Twain’s acquisition of a craft lost in his counterparts today...a different look at Samuel Clemens.” -- Booklist “A delight to read.” -- San Francisco Review of Books

Samuel Clemens (1835–1910) repeatedly traversed the ocean during his globetrotting life. A keen observer, the man who recast himself as Mark Twain was fascinated by seafaring. This book compiles selections ranging from his first voyage in 1866—San Francisco to Hawaii—to his circumnavigation of the world by steamship 1897. Despite his background as a “brown water” mariner, Twain was out of his element on the ocean. His writings about being at sea (as well as feeling at sea) reflect both a growing familiarity with voyaging and an enduring sense of amazement. Twain’s shipboard observations capture his interest and amusement in the “blue water” mariners he encountered, with their salty subculture and individual quirks. Twain at Sea collects the author’s essays and travelogues on the maritime world in one volume, including excerpts from Roughing It, The Innocents Abroad, A Tramp Abroad, Following the Equator, and other sources.