/lit/ - Literature

Thoughts on Twain?

>I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
books that make you feel this way?

>The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’s last sentence: “Some day it may seem worth while to take up the story of the younger ones again, and see what sort of men and women they turned out to be, therefore it will be the wisest not to reveal any of that part of their lives at present”.
>The present story of the characters literally resumes in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
What did he mean by that?

>"Some of the men were tall and stalwart, but all the women and children looked worn and sad and distressed with hunger. They reminded me much of indians did these people. They had but little clothing but such as they had was fanciful in character and fantastic in its arrangement. Any absurd gewgaw or grimcrack they had they disposed in such a way to attract attention most readily. They sat in silence and with tiredness patience watched our every motion with that vile, uncomplaining impoliteness which is so truly Indian, and which makes a white man so nervous and uncomfortable and savage that he wants to exterminate the whole tribe."
>"The little children were in pitiable condition—they all had sore eyes and were otherwise afflicted in various ways. They say that hardly a native child in all the east is free from sore eyes, and that thousands of them go blind of one eye or both every year. I think this must be so, for I see plenty of blind people every day, and I do not remember seeing any children that hadn't sore eyes. And would you suppose that an American mother could sit for an hour, with her child in her arms and let a hundred flies roost up on its eyes all that time undisturbed? I see that every day. It makes my flesh creep."

— Mark Twain commenting on Saudi Arabians from his book "The Innocents Abroad".

Let's settle this once and for all. Was he good?

Are there people who just don't care for Mark Twain's work? I have only read The Tragedy Of Puddin' Head Wilson and really enjoyed it.

>There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Fenimore Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now.

How do you cope with the fact this absolute madman wrote the first Isekai?

Literally an average new england machinist who arrives in a medieval setting and immediately starts toying with Gunpowder.

>You are not you--you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. I myself have no existence; I am but a dream--your dream, a creature of your imagination. In a moment you will have realized this, then you will banish me from your visions and I shall dissolve into the nothingness out of which you made me. I am perishing already, I am failing, I am passing away.
>In a little while you will be alone in shoreless space, to wander its limitless solitudes without friend or comrade forever—for you will remain a thought, the only existent thought, and by your nature inextinguishable, indestructible. But I, your poor servant, have revealed you to yourself and set you free. Dream other dreams, and better!
>Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago—centuries, ages, eons, ago!—for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities.
>Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell—mouths mercy and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!
>You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks—in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.
>It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream—a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought—a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!
Refute this