: Thomas Fensch
: At the Dangerous Edge of Social Justice Race, Violence and Death in America
: New Century Books
: 9780990718109
: 1
: CHF 7.80
:
: Geschichte
: English
: 250
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
This book is a searing indictment of reprehensible -- and often murderous -- racism in America from Mark Twain's Huck Finn on the Mississippi, to Emmett Till, killed in Mississippi in 1955, Medgar Evers killed in 1963, Malcolm X killed in 965, Martin Luther King Jr., killed in 1968, James Byrd Jr., killed in Texas in 1998 to Treyvon Martin killed in 2012. This is stark, unvarnished history. Highly important for understanding 20th century American culture.

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Huck Finn on the Mississippi


“All right, then, I’ll go to hell…”—Huckleberry Finn

“ALL MODERN LITERATURE COMES from one book by Mark Twain calledHuckleberry Finn…” Ernest Hemingway once said.“… it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”

Critic Lionel Trilling said:“It is (Twain’s) masterpiece, and perhaps he learned to know that. But he could scarcely have estimated it for what it is, one of the world’s great books and one of the central documents of American culture.”

William Faulkner said simply that Mark Twain was“the Father of American Literature.”

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in Florida, Missouri, scarcely a flyspeck on the map, November 30, 1835. He was four when the family moved to Hannibal, on the Mississippi. And, although he left Hannibal and traveled extensively throughout the world, figuratively he never left Hannibal; it served as the locale forThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer andAdventures of Huckleberry Finn, thinly disguised as St. Petersburg.

His brother Orion owned theHannibal Journal and Sam’l began as a printer’s apprentice, setting type; he quickly began contributing articles and brief sketches.

He became an itinerant printer at 18, working in New York City, Philadelphia, St. Louis and Cincinnati, picking up the local culture at each stop. Like Lincoln, who“read the law” by himself, Clemens became largely self-educated at local libraries in each city.

He returned to the midwest and during a voyage down the Mississippi, he was encouraged to become a riverboat pilot. Being a pilot, he was told, was an even higher calling than being a captain; the pilot needed to know each bend, current and hazard of 2,000 miles of the Mississippi. He received his pilot’s license in 1859. And eventually“found” his pseudonym, surely one of the most famous pen-names throughout literature.

Mark Twain was the call that signified two fathoms, or 12 feet of water; deep enough to be safe to navigate. He happily“borrowed it” from a previous owner, Captain Isaiah Sellers and told the story inLife on the Mississippi, published in 1883:

The old gentleman was not of literary turn or capacity, but he