Dangerous Water: A Biography Of The Boy Who Became Mark Twain

Powers, Ron

ISBN 10: 0306810867 / ISBN 13: 9780306810862

Published by Grand Central Publishing (edition First Edition), 2001

About this Item

It's a preowned item in good condition and includes all the pages. It may have some general signs of wear and tear, such as markings, highlighting, slight damage to the cover, minimal wear to the binding, etc., but they will not affect the overall reading experience.

Seller Inventory # 0306810867-11-1

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Dangerous Water: A Biography Of The Boy Who Became Mark Twain
• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing (edition First Edition)
• Publication Date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0306810867
• ISBN 13: 9780306810862
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Good

About this title

Synopsis

While Mark Twain remains one of our most quintessentially American writers, the actual boyhood experiences that fueled his most enduring literature remained largely unexplored,until now. Twain's early years were a decidedly un-innocent time, marked by deaths of friends and family and his father's bankruptcy. Twain dealt with those personal tragedies through humour and the tall tale. From the time that a ten-year-old Samuel Clemens lit out on his own and boarded his first Mississippi steamer to his first encounter with a traveling "mesmerizer" (which ignited his lifelong penchant for acting and spectacle), from the brooding sense of guilt and fear of eternal damnation inculcated into him at church to the superstitions and stories of witchcraft he learned from the blacks on his farm, Powers unforgettably shows how Mark Twain was shaped by the distinctly American landscape, culture, and people of Hannibal, Missouri. Jay Parini, the celebrated biographer of Robert Frost, called Dangerous Water "a long-needed evocation of the boyhood of the man who invented boyhood for all time. . . . An immensely shrewd and deeply engaging book, a great gift to all of us who love Twain."

About the Author

Ron Powers is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, novelist, and nonfiction writer. The coauthor of the best-selling Flags of Our Fathers with James Bradley, and with eight books of his own, he has been a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and commentator for CBS News Sunday Morning. His lives in Middlebury, Vermont.