Cristi
William Dean Howells was a great author, editor, and critic. He lived through the late 1800s to the early 1900s. It is not surprising that Howells went into the writing field considering his father owned a printer and publishing company in Ohio. He educated himself through reading and studying Spanish, French, Latin, and German. He then served a term as city editor of Ohio State Journal in 1858. Afterwards he moved onto publishing poems, stories, and reviews in the Atlantic Monthly along with many other magazines. He then was able to travel to New England where he got to meet many acclaimed authors i.e. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, James Russell Lowell, and Walt Whitman. He was on the campaign to write a biography on Abraham Lincoln.
“Howells is best known today for his realistic fiction, including A Modern Instance (1881), on the then-new topic of the social consequences of divorce; The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), his best-known work and one of the first novels to study the American businessman; and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), an exploration of cosmopolitan life in New York City as seen through the eyes of Basil and Isabel March, the protagonists of Their Wedding Journey (1871) and other works. Other important novels include Dr. Breen's Practice, (1880), The Minister's Charge and Indian Summer (1886), April Hopes (1887), The Landlord at Lion's Head (1897), and The Son of Royal Langbrith (1904).”
http://www.wsu.edu/%7Ecampbelld/howells/howchron1.htm <http://www.wsu.edu/%7Ecampbelld/howells/howchron1.htm>Matt
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/sc_as_mt/mtinlife.html
Here are the 15 images of Mark Twain that appeared in Life magazine.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, first published in America in January 1885, has always been in trouble. According to Ernest Hemingway, it was the "one book" from which "all modern American literature" came, and contemporary critics and scholars have treated it as one of the greatest American works of art. Of all Twain's novels, it was also the one that sold best at its initial appearance. On the other hand, it was condemned by many reviewers in Twain's time as coarse and by many commentators in our time as racist. In 1885 it was banished from the shelves of the Concord Public Library, an act that attracted a lot of publicity and discussion in the press. It is still frequently in the news, as various schools and school systems across the country either ban it from or restore it to their classrooms.
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/huckfinn/huckpix/huckpix.htmlJon
Positive Reviews
http://etext.virginia.edu/twain/harttime.html
http://etext.virginia.edu/twain/atlanta.html
http://etext.virginia.edu/twain/nation.html
Negative Reviews
http://etext.virginia.edu/twain/bosher.html
http://etext.virginia.edu/twain/sfdaily.html
http://etext.virginia.edu/twain/life1.html
opposing Huck
http://etext.virginia.edu/twain/nyherald.html
supporting Huck
http://etext.virginia.edu/twain/sfchron2.htmlMatt (cont.)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was Mark Twain's first novel. By the time Twain died, it had become an American classic, and it remains perhaps the best-loved of all his books among general readers. When it first came out in 1876, however, it was comparatively a failure. Despite Twain's determination "that Tom shall outsell any previous book of mine," the American Publishing Co. sold less than 24,000 copies in the book's first year.
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/tomsawye/tomillhp.html
Mark Twain's Memory-Builder
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/marketin/memory.htmlJohn
Mark Twain was one of the best writers and most famous writers in American History. He wrote the familiar books, Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer and many more. He lived in Hartford, Connecticut and lived a lavish life filled with the newest technologies of his time. These links show Mark Twain’s love for the technology of his time and also shows us some of the many inventions of this era.
http://blackboard.assumption.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab=courses&url=/bin/common/course.pl?course_id=_1063_1
Mark Twain was really into the industrialization of the world. In his books he always talked about or made reference to new technology of the time. I think it is interesting here because he boasts to be the first author to use the typewriter and it actually shows a picture of his typewrite.This link shows more of Mark Twain's love for technology. Mark Twain bought a telephone in the same year it was patented. Was one of first people to have a telephone, shows a picture of the model he had in his home.
Mark Twain's love for invention and technology almost made him broke. He invested thousands to produce a typewriter that never sold and took too long to get right. The move made him bankrupt.
Tony
Notes on Marketing of Mark Twain
Sold only by Subscription
-This system was seen by twain as positive, after selling his work Innocents Abroad
-Sold only by Subscription is for Twain, his books being sold by Sale Agents rather then selling them in bookstores, which would allow Twain to make more money that way, because of door to door visits of the Sale Agents
-This system was very popular during the time, which was 25 years of Twain’s career
-Twain sought to make more money by utilizing the system. It cost about 3 times as much as it would in a bookstore or with any other trade books
-Because he used the system to gain more money, his personal works were greatly marketed and commercialized
-these marketers helped get more money using rhetoric that conveyed them enlightening small towns with Twain’s great intellect
-It represented however, a demoralizing characteristic to his work because of how they commercialized great literature to make extra money, just a business.
-the article stated that Sale agents were "trained to talk a man into a state of imbecility, and then, under guise of giving him something he does not want, to rob him of his money."
-Twain knew out of 60,000 books sold, 50,000 of his books were sold to people who don’t visit bookstores
-so even if the selling of his books undermined his own literature, by way of the advertising diminishing the virtue of what Twain writes, he still made a lot of money
-This only furthered the principles and ideas of the Gilded Age. They advertise dumbly, by not expressing his genius and art, but it did allow for him to gain more than $2 on each copy
-Such a system makes one think if twain care more about profit then the spread of his own art and intellectJen
Frank Norris
Frank Norris was born in 1870 in Chicago. When he was 14 he moved to San Francisco, and grew up in a rich family. He studied and wrote in the discipline of naturalism, which is portraying humans as irrational animals driven by their own instincts. In his novel McTeagle, published in 1899, he wrote about a dentist who lost his job, murdered his wife, and ran away. People were disturbed by his realistic portrayal of squalor and violence. However, his realism would one day influence Upton Sinclair. He died in 1902 when he was 32 due to complications from appendicitis.
http://blackboard.assumption.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab=courses&url=/bin/common/course.pl?course_id=_1063_1
Norris wrote things to disorient and unsettle the “average reader.” He was writing at the time when Darwin’s ideas were new and popular, and therefore, he wrote about the “brute” animalistic characteristics in humans. In his work Fantaisie, his characters are more primitive and of lower social status, which he associated with alcohol. He described the females as more submissive and passive, and the males as more aggressive, when the popular assumption of the time was of these natural differences between males and females. In describing the suffering humanity in the poorer urban areas, he portrayed this as both humorous and tragic, and as a “dark comedy.” The narrator of the story was amoral and removed, and the message of the story wasn’t to be didactic or educational, but more to just show what really happened.
http://blackboard.assumption.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab=courses&url=/bin/common/course.pl?course_id=_1063_1
