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    How to Tell a Story and Other Essays
    How to Tell a Story and Other Essays
    How to Tell a Story and Other Essays
    Ebook53 pages36 minutes

    How to Tell a Story and Other Essays

    By Mark Twain

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJan 1, 1996
    Author

    Mark Twain

    Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was an American humorist and writer, who is best known for his enduring novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which has been called the Great American Novel. 

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      How to Tell a Story and Other Essays is one of Mark Twain's 'Hail-Mary' plays. Having been driven to bankruptcy in 1894, Twain set out to pay his debts and rebuild his fortune. He was hampered in that effort by a series of events, being stricken with grief by the death of his beloved daughter Suzy in 1896 among them. How to Tell a Story is a small collection of humorous essays and anecdotes thrown together in the midst of Twain's emotional moil and published as a book in 1897. Received by the public with middlin' acclaim, sales of the book helped the Twain family sleep under a roof until, finally, in 1898, they were rescued from ruin with the help of Mr. H. H. Rogers (on the board at Standard Oil). Not to put too fine a point on it, we see there that some benefits do attach to being 'America's most-beloved author'.As originally published, How to Tell a Story (hereafter HTS)comprised eight essays. The first of them is "How to Tell a Story." There Twain used 10 pages to discuss technical differences between writing a shaggy dog for enjoyment by readers and telling a shaggy dog in front of a live audience. As the author amusingly pointed out, the two efforts entail entirely different skill sets.The book's second offering is "In Defence of Harriet Shelley." There Twain laid out a lengthy demolition of Prof. Edward Dowden's 1886 attempt at a biography of English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Twain's beef with Dowden was that the biographer covered poet Shelley's wild promiscuity by making a scarlet woman of Shelley's first wife (a child bride aged 16) and laying all the blame for Shelley's sexual hijinks at the foot of her innocent bed. Twain was correct: Dowden's treatment of Shelley and his first wife was more than grossly unfair. It was one of the greasiest pieces of hagiography anyone could imagine. But beating that same horse over and over across 76 pages made Twain's case tiresome rather than funnier. Long before he was done, Twain looked more of an ass than he sought to make of Dowden.The third essay, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences," is richly humorous and made even more so by the fact that its most outrageous accusations are all perfectly true. I read James Fenimore Cooper at my mother's knee. Because he was one of her own childhood favorites, she inflicted Cooper upon me when she saw how much I (as a little boy) liked Walt Disney's "Davy Crockett." Most of today's readers probably know Cooper only from watching The Last of the Mohicans, the epic, 1992 film starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe. Thanks to Hollywood screen writers and the magic of cinematography, most youngsters probably have no idea how utterly awful a writer Fenimore Cooper actually was. But Mark Twain explains it to them in fine detail. "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences," for my money, is the funniest essay in the book.Other essays in HTS are "Traveling with a Reformer," "Private History of the 'Jumping Frog' Story," "Mental Telegraphy Again," "What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us," and "A Little Note to M. Paul Bourget."The Oxford Mark Twain edition of How to Tell a Story (HTS) also features an introductory essay by novelist David Bradley and an afterword by Pascal Covici, Jr., both of which bear directly on material featured in HTS. David Bradley's Introduction provides a wryly humorous and keenly insightful, black man's take on how childhood exposure to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn set him on a long path that led him (as a young man) to eschew the life of a literary racist and become an author, instead. Covici's Afterword illuminates the critical tales and essays that appear in HTS, allowing readers make better sense of them by setting them in context. The Oxford Mark Twain edition of How to Tell a Story is a strong book but now, in the year 2012, it is the work of Covici and Bradley as much as that of Twain himself in which the strength of this book resides.MORE TO FOLLOW

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    How to Tell a Story and Other Essays - Mark Twain

    The Project Gutenberg EBook of How Tell a Story and Others

    by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

    almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or

    re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

    with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

    Title: How Tell a Story and Others

    Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

    Release Date: August 20, 2006 [EBook #3250]

    Last Updated: October 31, 2012

    Language: English

    *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HOW TELL A STORY AND OTHERS ***

    Produced by David Widger

    HOW TO TELL A STORY

    AND OTHERS

    by Mark Twain

    Contents

    HOW TO TELL A STORY

              THE WOUNDED SOLDIER.

              THE GOLDEN ARM.

    MENTAL TELEGRAPHY AGAIN

    THE INVALID'S STORY

    HOW TO TELL A STORY

              The Humorous Story an American Development.—Its Difference

              from Comic and Witty Stories.

    I do not claim that I can tell a story as it ought to be told. I only claim to know how a story ought to be told, for I have been almost daily in the company of the most expert story-tellers for many years.

    There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind—the humorous. I will talk mainly about that one. The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.

    The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular; but the comic and witty stories must be brief and end with a point. The humorous story bubbles gently along, the others burst.

    The humorous story is strictly a work of art—high and delicate art—and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it. The art of telling a humorous story—understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print—was created in America, and has remained at home.

    The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it; but the teller of the comic story tells you beforehand that it is one of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it with eager delight, and is the first person to laugh when he gets through. And sometimes, if he has had good success, he is so glad and happy that he will repeat the nub of it and glance around from face to face, collecting applause, and then repeat it again. It is a pathetic thing to see.

    Very often, of course, the rambling and disjointed humorous story finishes with a nub, point, snapper, or whatever you like to call it. Then the listener must be alert, for in many cases the teller will divert attention from that nub by dropping it in a carefully casual

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