Classicly Blog

Richard Harding Davis

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 00:49:18 +0000

In 1898, at the age of thirty-four, Richard Harding Davis was famous. He was the idol of small boys, all journalists were trying to write like him, and he filled the dreams of ladies reading in hammocks.

He was young, handsome, and dashing, and he translated his adventurous life into swiftly moving prose. He’d already written Gallegher: A Newspaper Story, as the fruit of reporting experiences in his hometown, Philadelphia. He had been a reporter in New York, and had traveled all over the country, perfecting an already almost-perfect reportorial sense.

Through a rapid succession of global adventures, and to a chorus of growing acclaim he moved from Moscow to Hungary, to Cuba. From there he traveled to Greece to report a war, where he would officially earned the title “war correspondent.”

A boon companion to Theodore Roosevelt, Davis helped to create the legend surrounding the Rough Riders, for which he was made an honorary member. He found himself in Cuba again in 1898 at the outbreak of the war with Spain, where he had some of his greatest adventures, performed some of his bravest deeds, and wrote some of his best articles.

Nothing he was ever to do again - except for a sudden flaring up in 1914, at Vera Cruz and in Belgium - would match glory of his times in Cuba. R.H.D. died in 1916.

The Bar Sinister, The Scarlet Car, and Real Soldiers of Fortune show Davis at his lightly moving, effortless best. Even more than a chronicler of a period, he was a teller of good yarns for all time.

James Oliver Curwood

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 20:01:19 +0000

“ADVENTURING INTO THE WILD PLACES I have met a new manhood and a new womanhood — the manhood and womanhood of the far North. Closer and closer I have come into the hearts and understanding of men, and women, and little children born under the open skies and whose forefathers were born under the open skies. And it is impossible for me not to write about these people, of their lives of tragedy, of romance, of pathos — just as it is impossible for me not to write my stories of the wild creatures I know.”

                                        			 - JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD

That was James Oliver Curwood’s creed, at least so far as one can tell from the best of his books. Nomads of the North, River’s End, The Valley of Silent Man, and Kazan were primarily written in a cabin hundreds of miles from civilization. They are imbued with his belief that “Nature is the Great Doctor” and that God is to be found everywhere in Nature; their characters, both animal and human, all have the great open spaces for a stage.

Curwood explained the internal force which led him to live and write so close to Nature: “My father’s uncle was Captain Marryat, the great English writer of adventure stories. I have inherited a certain amount of Indian blood from a Mohawk Indian princess who was my mother’s great-great grandmother. I was expelled from high school because I loved Nature too well. So I buried myself in a big Michigan swamp, and earned enough money by trapping to take me to the University of Michigan.”

Following college, Curwood went into newspaper work. In 1907 he abandoned it and returned to Owosso, Michigan, the town where he was born, to devote himself to writing. At this time Mr. Curwood was a great hunter. His twenty-seven guns were scarred with notches to record his “kills.” His home was filled with heads and skins.

Gradually, however, he came to the belief that hunting wild creatures was wrong, and from 1910 until his death in 1927 he devoted his energies toward conservation. He spent several months of each year in the wilds, preferably as far North as he could get, and was the only American ever employed by the Canadian government as explorer and descriptive writer. Curwood’s change of heart might best be conveyed by a quote from The Grizzly King: “The greatest thrill is not to kill but to let live.”

Curwood was not only an authority on the Northwoods, but he had an unusual knowledge of animal life and psychology. He is at his best in such a book as Kazan. If he is sentimental, he is also rugged and red-blooded; if his characters are too sharply black and white, the spirit of the woods does pervade his writing and and inspire a longing for its simplicity and its peace.

Guy de Maupassant

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 18:00:50 +0000

OBSERVE SOME PERSON or object closely enough and long enough to see it in a way never before seen — that was the rule, and the only rule, which Henri Rene Albert Guy de Maupassant followed. Although be wrote for only a dozen years, went “out like a thunderbolt,” he is universally hailed as a great master, even the father, of the modern short story.

The young Maupassant in Paris, who looked more like a “simple young athlete” than a potential author - or the clerk in the Naval Department, his intended career — divided his time between rowing expeditions and visits to the house of the author Flaubert. Here the leaders of the “naturalist” school gathered: Zola, Daudet, Mendes, Turgenev, and others.

By the time Maupassant was twenty-three (1873), Flaubert had recognized his genius, and for the next seven years tutored him rigorously. Hardly anything young Guy wrote during these years survived - it was all destroyed by a merciless perfectionist who expected even better.

In 1880, when de Maupassant’s first story, “Boule de Suif,” was published, he was writing at his best. His recognition was instant and overwhelming. During the next six years he wrote hundreds of stories, among them those which still stand high in the ranks of all short stories.

In 1886 the first signs of mental illness appeared, the result of syphilis, which would lead to his death seven years later. In intervals during these seven years he continued to produce stories, novels, plays, many of which show undiminished genius. He died in 1893.

Some have argued that Maupassant had no personal psychology, no theory of art, no strong moral foundations regarding the world, which might have been so. But perhaps his freedom from such theories and rigid principles gave him the widest possible angle for his incredible powers of observation, and allowed him to spear the significant facts about people and things with his clear and pointed prose.

His stories are superbly ironic, written with utter objectivity and economy of words. Guy de Maupassaunt’s literary legacy would influence W. Somerset Maugham, O. Henry, and Henry James, and affect the life of the short story forever after.

James Branch Cabell

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 20:34:28 +0000

WRITING PERFECTLY about beautiful happenings was James Branch Cabell’s ideal, and to it he devoted his life. In a world of realists he was an out-and-out romanticist, but a romanticist naïve and ironic at once, with a modern psychological touch, and above all, a polished and fluid prose style.

“I desire of literature,” Cabell once said, “precisely those things of which I most poignantly and most constantly feel the lack in my own life. And it is that which romance affords her postulants…. Romance it is undoubtedly who whispers to every man that life is not a blind and aimless business that he is strong and excellent and wise. It is solely by believing himself a creature but little lower than the cherubim that man has by interminable slow degrees become, upon the whole, distinctly superior to the chimpanzee…” Thus Cabell explains his literary escape to his fantastical land of Poictesme, a fictional province in France.

Until 1919 Cabell was known to only a few who delighted in beautiful prose, and who found it in the dozen books which the cultured young Virginian had already written. They found also lively flights of the imagination, a rare combination of disillusion and dreams, humor, poetry in English, French, or Latin - always quoted as someone else’s, and later discovered to be his own.

Then in 1919 came his book Jurgen, featuring an eponymous hero who embarks on a journey through ever more fantastic realms, even to hell and heaven, seducing women the whole way… even the Devil’s wife. Thus his works were flagged by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, resulting in a celebrated obscenity case. His books were later reissued, and were generally adored by critics and sophisticated readers for decades.

The post-Jurgen books form a cycle planned years ago by Cabell, who, as an author, was fond of creating meta-fictional, imaginary, books-within-books. This cycle traces its genealogical thread from Dom Manuel, Count of Poictesme, in Figures of Earth, to his fictional author Felix Kennaston, of early 20th Century Virginia. Each book deals with a romantic human desire and its frustrations: the search for beauty, for love, for chivalry, for escape.

Cabell was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1879. In 1898 he graduated from the College of William and Mary; he also taught Greek and French there. For a while he worked on the Baltimore Times, the New York Herald, traveled, and wrote occasional short stories and articles for magazines. His first book, The Eagle’s Shadow, appeared in 1904. An enthusiastic genealogist and antiquarian, he published several treatises on Virginia history.

H. L. Mencken, one of his early admirers, says of Cabell:

“He takes the ancient and mouldy parts of speech — the liver and lights of harangues by Dr. Harding, of editorials in the New York Times, of Science and Health, with a Key to the Scriptures, of department store advertisements, of college yells, of chautauqual oratory, of smokeroom anecdote, and arranges them in mosaics that glitter with an almost fabulous light. He knows where a red noun should go, and where a peacock-blue verb, and where an adjective as darkly purple as a grape. He is an imagist in prose. You may like his story and you may not like it, but if you don’t like the way he tells it then there is something the matter with your ears.”

Eugene O'Neill

Tue, 30 Aug 2011 18:45:47 +0000

EUGENE O’NEILL had to explain himself often. And certainly one sees why, for no modern playwright was more continuously discussed, more divergently assessed, more enthusiastically praised and heartily denounced during his time. Most critics agreed, however, whether good or bad art, his plays were significant experiments in the development of the American drama.

O’Neill was born in New York City, but before he began to write plays he had journeyed all over the western hemisphere. After a brief stay at Princeton University, and a few months working in a mail-order house, he set off for Honduras on a prospecting expedition. He returned with a bad case of malaria, following, in his own words, “much hardship, little romance, no gold.” But soon he was off again: this time to Buenos Aires on a Norwegian barque. During the next few years he did everything from selling sewing machines to minding the stock on a cattle ship. He also spent several months living on the Buenos Aires beach, where food and lodging were uncertain.

He returned to the United States and joined his father, an actor in a New Orleans vaudeville circuit, for a performance of Monte Cristo. From there he spent some time as a newspaper reporter in New London, Connecticut. He began to write plays in 1913, and soon finished a dozen. “Of these,” he says, “Bound East for Cardiff is the only one worth remembering.” This play definitely launched his dramatic career. It was produced in 1916 by the Provincetown Players, with whom he was associated thereafter.

In 1920, with Beyond the Horizon, he won the Pulitzer Prize for the best play of the year. In 1922 he won it again with Anna Christie. In the meantime, The Emperor Jones and Diff’rent appeared, and, to a rising crescendo of praise, The Hairy Ape, Welded, Desire Under the Elms, Marco Millions, The Great God Brown, Strange Interlude, and Lazarus Laughed. Ile was written in 1919, and is a good example of the intensity of desire with which Eugene O’Neill characterized the outstanding figures in his dramas.

10 Awesome Facts from the Biography of Edgar Allan Poe

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 18:45:37 +0000

While reading the Edgar Allan Poe bio I stumbled across some sweet facts about the man - one of America’s most celebrated short story and poetry writers. Though he’s one of the American Greats, Poe never seemed to do anything right at first. Here we have 10 Awesome facts about Poe as a young man:

Edgar Allan Poe’s parents were both actors - This may seem cool now, but in 1812 it was a low class profession. Both parents died when Edgar was a baby, leaving him in the foster care of the Allan family.

Poe studied in England as a child - Perhaps it was due to his English blood, but Edgar got along abroad with his classmates, excelled at school and was pretty happy. It was only in the States that he got into trouble.

Poe was an athletic young man - Though he may look like a wispy poet, as a youth Edgar was a keen runner, a good boxer, and a solid swimmer: one annectode has him swimming the James River in Virginia 6 miles in the blazing June heat, against the !@cut current.

School Daze

He studied at the Univeristy of Virginia - When Edgar was 17 he entered the newly formed University, which was founded by Thomas Jefferson the year before. His major was to be foreign languages, but he could only hack it one year.

Much mischief was had by all - Poor Jefferson, founding father - he wanted a fine instution of higher learning, but those first years there was plenty of “gambling and dissipation,” horse play (actual horses), duels, riots… and years later even the murder of a professor.

Poe did more gambling than studying - In his year at college Edgar racked up gambling debts into the thousands. His foster father, the wealthy merchant John Allan, kept sending money for books and furnishings, but Edgar kept blowing it on the cards.

Poe was like a 19th century Jim Morrison - He was known to go about drunk, quoting poetry, and tagging up the dorms with brillaint grotesque artwork in charcoal. To be fair guess I should say that Jim Morrison was a 20th century Edgar Allen Poe.

Army Poet?

Poe quit school and joined the army - First he traveled to Boston to try acting like his parents; failing in this, he joined the military. Though he was still a minor, he said he was 22 years old and went by the name “Edgar Allan Perry”. This was likely in case he wanted to go A.W.O.L.

In the army he wrote his first book of poems - Though he made a better soldier than student, Poe spent more time in the Army writing poetry. His book ‘Tamerlane’ was the result. Again, Poe was doing the exact opposite of what was expected.

Poe was eventually discharged as a Sgt. Major - Well, not Poe exactly - he was discharged as Sgt. Major Edgar Allan Perry, his psuedonym. Apparently he couldn’t get enough of military life, since he then applied to West Point. Wait, wasn’t he already in the regular Army? There he goes again, doing it backwards.

The biography of Edgar Allan Poe is a fascinating look at one of America’s most celebrated authors… there will certainly be more tidbits of awesomeness to come. Got any cool annecdotes or favorite facts about Edgar Allan Poe? Post ‘em here!

Free Books for iPhone 2.2! Reviews. Registration. Revamp.

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 18:28:00 +0000

Since the very first version of Free Books, we’ve wanted to add reviews and bookmark syncing. With this update, we’re well on our way!

Reviews

We’ve added ratings right smack dab in the middle of the reader menu. Tap a star, boom, you’ve left a rating. And, after leaving a rating, we prompt you to leave a written review.

Already we’re seeing ratings and reviews pour in- given a few months, we’ll be able to have a fantastic sort-by-rating option while browsing.

Registration

Right now registration is just for reviews. But, very soon, we’re going to be putting out bookmark sync. Download a book on iPad, read a few pages, fire up your iPhone, boom! Your new book’s right there, complete with bookmarks, highlights, and notes.

We’re also working on letting you access your collection online, via Classicly’s HTML5 reader. And, eventually, uploading your own PDFs by drag and drop! All on the horizon, and all powered by the ne registration system.

Revamp

Since the huge 2.0 redesign we’ve noticed a lot of things we wanted to change. So, we changed them! The top toolbar buttons are now much, much easier to tap. The reader fits in better with the rest of the app. The whole app is a bit brighter. And, naturally enough, we now have a big green button to Download and Read.

Check it out!

If you’ve already downloaded the app, just check the ‘Updates’ tab of the App Store. Haven’t gotten it yet? What are you waiting for ;) Click here to download Free Books for iPhone.

9 Awesome Facts about Mark Twain the Technophile

Wed, 25 May 2011 21:58:28 +0000

Samuel Clemens, aka, Mark Twain, was obsessed with technology. He once famously said, “Name the greatest of all inventors… Accidents.” But whatever was going on around him was no accident.

The Industrial Revolution was in full tilt. He bought, used, championed, invested in, and lost money on all kinds of marvels of the 19th and early 20th century. Mark Twain was the king of early adopters.

Invention Fail

Mark Twain was a big fan of the fountain pen, which at first was a total mess. It spread ink all over your paper as often as it worked right, and was the butt of many jokes.

Twain disliked suspenders, !@cutso he devised an adjustable strap for clothing, for which he received his first patent (#121,992) in 1871. Its full title was: “Improvement in Adjustable and Detachable Straps for Garments” The strap was supposed to tighten shirts at the waist. So, like a belt?

Twain conjured up a memorization game for children, but it was so complex that children couldn’t even comprehend it. It was called Mark Twain’s Memory-Builder (A Game for Acquiring and Retaining All Sorts of FACTS and DATES). Oddly enough, the quintessentially American Twain focused primarily on facts about European Royalty.

Stick to writing

When it came to inventions, Twain was all about the ‘better mouse trap.’ He loved ideas that improved on others, but when it came to novel inventions he wasn’t interested. So when Alexander Graham Bell offered him as much stock as he wanted for $500, Twain refused. This would be like Bill Gates coming to you in 1984 with a nearly free bucket of Microsoft stock. Doh! Twain commented:

“A man invents a thing which could revolutionize the arts, produce mountains of money, and bless the earth, and who will bother with it or show any interest in it?–and so you are just as poor as you were before. But you invent some worthless thing to amuse yourself with, and would throw it away if let alone, and all of a sudden the whole world makes a snatch for it and out crops a fortune.” - The American Claimant

Despite his missed fortune, in 1877 Twain became one of the first private citizens to have a telephone installed in his home (mind you the telephone had been invented the year before). There were only a few other telephones in existence, and so there was no one really to call. One notable example was the telephone in the White House, which resided in a phone booth outside the Oval Office.

The 200 Ton Piano

Twain was an original fan of the Telharmonium, said to be the first electronic musical instrument. It transmitted ‘music’ over telephone wires, which could be piped into hotels, stores, and private homes. Typically as a technology progresses, it gets smaller and better - not so with the Telharmonium. By its second incarnation it weighed 200 tons, took up much of a New York Building, and essentially required its own power station just to run. The fact that it disrupted phone service and sounded horrible probably had to do with its failure as well. This didn’t stop Twain’s fascination with it. His was the only favorable review of the contraption at the time.

Pay Dirt

Twain finally scored when he invested money in a self-pasting scrap book he called “Mark Twain’s Patent Scrapbook.” According to The St. Louis Post-Dispatch (8 June 1885), he had made $200,000 from all his other books, and $50,000 from the scrapbook alone.

Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla were good friends. Twain often ventured into Tesla’s lab to mess with awesome newfangled gadgets.

Bad Idea Jeans

Despite his modest success as an inventor, Twain’s gadgetophilia was hardly a blessing. Such was the case with the Paige Compositor, an automatic typesetting machine which replaced a human with a mechanical arm. Its inventor, James Paige, had convinced Twain to invest $300K ($7 Million today) - all of his earnings from books, and much of his wealthy wife’s inheritance money. The machine was never built successfully, and Twain was forced to claim bankruptcy.

“I have, as you say, been interested in patents and patentees. If your books tell how to exterminate inventors send me nine editions. Send them by express.”   -Mark Twain, A Biography

If Mark Twain were alive he’d already have the iPhone 5. And a hoverboard. But knowing him he’d also probably invent the Slanket, only to have someone come along and make millions off the Snuggie.

10 Awesome Facts about Charles Dickens

Wed, 25 May 2011 20:34:21 +0000

10 Awesome Facts about Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens, the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era, was an interesting, if rather odd character. Facts about Charles Dickens include many personality quirks which are bound to fascinate fans of this literary legend.

“What the…!?”

The phrase “What the Dickens” has nothing to do with Charles Dickens.

This phrase, which is used to mean “a lot” - as in ‘that hurt like the dickens’ - is a euphemism for the word devil. It might have come from the word ‘devilkins.’ Shakespeare used it in The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1600: “I cannot tell what the dickens his name is my husband had him of.”

Dickens named many of his children after his favorite authors. Among his 10 children were Alfred Tennyson Dickens, Henry Fielding Dickens, and Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens. He then gave them all nicknames:

Charles Jr., “Charley”
Mary, “Mamie”
Kate, “Lucifer Box”
Walter, “Young Skull”
Francis, “Chickenstalker”
Alfred, “Sampson Brass,” or “Skittles”
Sydney, “The Ocean Spectre,” or “The Admiral”
Henry, “Mr. H”
Dora, (Died in infancy)
Edward, “Plorn”

Charles Dickens’s own nickname was !@cut “Boz”

Mad Genius

Dickens had a “mild” case of OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). He rearranged furniture in the house, including all the beds which had to face North - South, supposedly due to “magnetic fields.” He was also obsessed with the tidiness of the house, leaving notes to his children scorning them for not picking up well enough. He also touched objects three times for “luck,” and combed his hair hundreds of times a day.

Dickens suffered, at least in childhood, from epilepsy. He described three of his characters as having epileptic seizures, or ‘The Falling Sickness’ : Edward Leeford, Oliver Twist’s half-brother; a headmaster in Our Mutual Friend; and Guster, a maid in Bleak House. Modern doctors find Dickens’s descriptions of the disease remarkably accurate for a period when little was known about it.

Dickens was fascinated with mesmerism, aka hypnotism. He practiced it and had restorative results on his wife, a hypochondriac, as well as his children, friends and associates.

Dickens believed that a human could die from spontaneous human combustion (SHC). In his novel Bleak House, one of his characters, Krook, dies from SHC.

Super Hype

When The Old Curiosity Shop was published in serial form in 1841, the worldwide hype was unprecedented. Thousands of fans lined the piers in New York City to shout at approaching British Sailors: “Is Little Nell alive?” Such mania over a novel’s end hasn’t been seen again until the release of the final Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Dickens is perhaps the only author to have a theme park devoted to his legacy (we hope). Dickens World in Chatham, England , contains Europe’s longest indoor dark ride, the “Great Expectations” log flume, and the Haunted House of Ebenezer Scrooge.

Near Death

In June 1865 Dickens and his mistress Nelly Ternan were involved in the Staplehurst rail crash. They had been traveling in the first-class car, which was the only one of the 8 cars not to crash into the river below. After helping the other passengers to safety, he went in to save the manuscript of his novel Our Mutual Friend.

Know any other awesome facts about Charles Dickens? Post ‘em here!

The Long Wondrous Life of Mark Twain

Mon, 16 May 2011 21:37:19 +0000

Unless you were raised in a cave, you’ve heard someone quote Mark Twain. Folks have been using his quips and quotes like a condiment for over 100 years, peppering speeches and blog entries with his humorous witticisms. Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain - the “father of American literature” - lived as vividly and adventurously as any of the characters he wrote into fiction. So get ready for some awesome facts about his Mark Twain, peppered with quotes!

Holy Halley’s

Clemens was born during the weeks that Halley’s Comet made its migration across the skies in 1835!@cut, and would famously say “It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet.” In the year 1909, the year before its return, he proclaimed:

“The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’ ” Twain had ‘predicted’ correctly: he in fact died during the return of Halley’s Comet in 1910.

Twain’s fascination with his own death was affected by the death of his brother in a riverboat explosion, which he foresaw in a vivid dream a month before it occurred. This haunted Clemens the remainder of his years, and it would lead to a lifelong interest in parapsychology.

Young Sam

Back in his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, Clemens witnessed several brutal murders - scenes which would appear later in his novels. During this same period his father died of pneumonia. Young Sam Clemens, 11 years old, actually hid away in a secret spot to watch his father's autopsy.

When he was fourteen Clemens left school to become a printer’s apprentice. A few years later he began work as a typesetter at his brother Orion’s newspaper, The Hannibal Journal. By the tender age of 16 Clemens had begun his writing career, submitting humorous sketches and articles under the name Josh.

After ten years of toiling away as a printer, Clemens yearned for something more adventurous. Upon reading that the natives of South America chewed coca leaves for energy, he decided to travel South to open up the coca leaf trade (which is an example of one of his ‘get rich quick’ ideas). But by the time he reached New Orleans, Clemens had a better idea.

On his way down the Mississippi Twain decided to become a riverboat pilot. For two years he set about “the stupendous task of learning the twelve hundred miles of the Mississippi River between St. Louis and New Orleans – of knowing it as exactly and unfailingly, even in the dark, as one knows the way to his own features.” Riverboat pilot’s made about $250 a month, or $75K a year in today’s money.

As a child Clemens hated going to school. He famously said ” I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” Having dropped out of school very young, Twain taught himself, and learned what he wanted to know by working as a journalist. That said, in 1907 he was awarded a Doctorate of Letters from Oxford University, officially making him Dr. Twain.

Twain the Man

During his days as a reporter in Nevada, Twain was infamous for publishing and popularizing hoaxes. One famous hoax centered around the supposed discovery of a petrified man in the desert. Another, the “Empire City Massacre,” described the deeds of a Carson City man who killed his wife and six children.

Clemens spent summers on his uncle’s farm in Missouri. There he picked up slave stories, folk tales, and the various dialects he used in his work. He addressed this in the preface to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

“A number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary ‘Pike-County’ dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guess-work; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several patterns of speech.”

Mark Twain disliked Jane Austen and her work: “Jane Austen’s books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.” So it’s better to have an empty library than one with books by Jane Austen? Down with the Janeites!

Some have claimed that Mark Twain’s book Tom Sawyer(1876) was the first novel ever to be written on a typewriter. This is not true. Twain was the first author to submit a typed manuscript to his publisher, but a). It had been written longhand first, and was typed later. And b). The book was in fact Life on the Mississippi.

Twain loved cats. It has been noted that he lived with up to 19 at one time: “Of all God’s creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.”

Have any favorite facts or fun quotes by Mark Twain? Post ‘em here! Just remember, before you quote Mark Twain, that many of the quotes that get ascribed to him, he never said. But we’ll cover that next time.

By the Name of Twain

Fri, 13 May 2011 21:59:41 +0000

If you were born Samuel Langhorn Clemens, you too might change your name to Mark Twain. It's fitting that the manner in which Samuel Clemens, the "father of American literature," became Mark Twain is actually a widely held fiction. In his earlier days, before he adopted Twain as his nom de plume, Clemens used a few others.

Until 1863 he signed several imaginative sketches Josh, (maybe like "just joshing"), while for another series of humorous letters he used Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass.!@cut

Twain said, "Although Smith, Jones, and Johnson are easy names to remember when there is no occasion to remember them, it is next to impossible to recollect them when they are wanted." So if your name is bland, hey, invent one that sticks.

The Three Twains

The handle Mark Twain itself, perhaps the most famous pen name in literature, has three potential origins. The most well-known and widely-believed one comes from the Mississippi River itself. When the leadsman (the guy in charge of the 'sounding line') sank the rope to the two--fathom knot, it meant the boat had a safe depth of twelve feet of water beneath it, and he called out, "By the mark, twain!" 'Twain' is an old-fashioned term for "two," which leads us to the next version of Clemens's name.

According to the newspaper The Daily Alta California, Twain got his name from his days drinking with his rabble-rousing friends at John Piper's saloon on B street in Virginia City, Nevada. Piper didn't offer a bar tab to anyone except his trusted regulars, so as a favor he'd occasionally chalk up drinks owed on the wall behind the bar. From time to time Clemens, after a lively drinking match with his mates, would let out "mark twain" to Piper, or "leave two chalk marks."

Clemens would later respond to this by writing: "Mark Twain was the nom de plume of one Captain Isaiah Sellers, who used to write river news over it for the New Orleans Picayune. He died in 1869 and as he could no longer need that signature, I laid violent hands upon it without asking permission of the proprietor's remains. That is the history of the nom de plume I bear."

So there you have it. He stole it.

Whatever the origin of the Twain name, Clemens was a man with dual identities: Some friends called him Clemens, while his family and childhood mates still called him Sam. "Mark Twain" was also his persona, the genial, avuncular storyteller who would charm lecture audiences around the world - it served to cover the darker, more serious Samuel Clemens. But, perhaps to confound everyone that much more, he would often sign his name with the double autograph, Samuel L. Clemens Mark Twain.

Read Romance Online for Free with Classicly

Fri, 06 May 2011 02:05:55 +0000

So you just got a new iPad or a Kindle, and now you'd love to find some romance books online for free? If you're a real lover of romantic fiction, then there's no better place to start than the classics! One of the first and best works of romance is Murasaki Shikibu's epic masterpiece the Tale of Genji, a highly-acclaimed work of Japanese literature. Another oldie but goodie is Samuel Richardson's book Pamela, about a poor yet beautiful 15 year old hand maiden whose master tries to seduce her.!@cut

Or there's Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which was uber scandalous when it was published in 1891: it featured an illegitimate child whose guilt and shame tears apart her marriage during the staunch moral hypocrisy of the Victorian era. Don't let their age fool you - anyone looking for romance books online for free will surely love these torrid and beautifully written romantic novels.

Why pay for free books?

If you don't have a Kindle or an iPad, you can always read online romance books for free with Classicly's built-in reader. Maybe you'd like to catch up on the classics while you're working (wink wink). No list of romance books would be complete without Jane Austen. You can read Pride and Prejudice, which is considered by many to be the epitome of romance. Or there's Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, about as torrid and passionate as you're gonna get.

If chivalrous knights are your thing, the famous book Le Morte D'Arthur will surely please - it's full of courtly love, virtue, valor and magic. There are tons of options when you'd like to read online romance books for free, such as the famous Phantom of the Opera, The Scarlet Pimpernel, or the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Download or read one online today!

Free Books Online to Read from The Observer's 100 Greatest List

Fri, 06 May 2011 01:34:53 +0000

When it comes to searching for top-notch free books online to read, one good method is to seek out a popular book list. The Observer, a British sunday newspaper that's been around since 1791, published on its blog The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time.

This list was compiled by submissions from its readers, so it will obviously reflect the age, education, and inclinations of the English reading public. But hey, the English did invent the language after all, so they deserve a certain privilege. Out of the 100 novels on The Observer list, 44 are free books online to read - anytime, anywhere.!@cut You can download these great titles for your iPad, Kindle or Sony Reader, or enjoy them right on Classicly's built-in reader.

Why pay for free books?

The Observer's list from 2003 is most likely a response to The Modern Library publishing its famous "100 Best" list 5 years earlier. Since then it's been a veritable "list off," in which every publisher and newspaper has compiled their own list of the "greats." This is awesome if you're looking for free books online to read, because no matter where you live or what your accent is, you can always find a list of fantastic books to suit your needs.

That said, the Observer's list only consists of novels - the editor's intentionally left out poetry and plays to keep the list from growing wildly out of proportion. Thus this internal rule kicked some big ones off the list: Homer, Shakespeare, and the Bible, and many more. But what The Observer editors finally came up with is a great list in general, and when it comes to finding free books online to read, it's a perfect place to begin your search.

P.S., Like this list? Check out our Modern Library's famous list for many more awesome free books online to read. What do you think of this list? Let us know what you would add to it.

Free Books to Read Online from Modern Library's 100 Best List

Thu, 14 Apr 2011 22:03:06 +0000

You love to read great works of literature, but sometimes you just can’t settle on a book to read. One great place to find free books to read online is with a list of the 20th century’s greatest works of fiction! In 1998, The Modern Library published its famous “100 Best” list, a collection of the crowning achievements of English language fiction from the last century.

This list was generated by a poll of more than 400,000 avid readers. Of the 100 “Best” books, 27 are free !@cut books to read online using a built-in reader, or are free to download for your iPad, Kindle, or Sony tablet

Why pay for free books?

The Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels of the Century is a fantastic list, and its creation was certainly no half-hearted attempt: the panel of judges consisted of some of the finest literary talents alive, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., William Styron, Gore Vidal, Daniel J. Boorstin, A. S. Byatt, Christopher Cerf, Vartan Gregorian, John Richardson, Edmund Morris, and Shelby Foote.

Some argued that because this list was compiled by an American company, that it’s inherently an Americentric list, which caused British, Canadian and Australian publishers to produce their own competing “Best” lists. Either way it’s the readers gain! Now Classicly has packaged up this collection of totally free books to read online

P.S., If you like this list, and are looking for other great free books to read online, check out The Observer’s List here. Do you have any comments about this list? What are your favorite books from the early 20th Century?