How to Tell a Story and Others

By Mark Twain

First published in 1897, "How to Tell a Story and Others" is a series of short stories and advice by Mark Twain. In them Twain describes his own writing style, attacks the idiocy of a fellow author, defends the virtue of a dead woman, and tries to protect ordinary citizens from insults by railroad conductors. This collection is highly recommended for those with an interest in creative writing and is not to be missed by fans of Twain’s seminal work. Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), more commonly known under the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, lecturer, publisher and entrepreneur most famous for his novels “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (1876) and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” (1884). Other notable works by this author include: “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today” (1873) and “The Prince and the Pauper” (1881). Read & Co. Classics is proudly republishing this fantastic work now in a new edition complete with a specially-commissioned biography of the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Sep 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781473374300

Mark Twain

Frederick Anderson, Lin Salamo, and Bernard L. Stein are members of the Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley.

Book preview

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Reviews for How to Tell a Story and Others

[dekesolomon · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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