It was delightful. I think it was and possibly still is required reading in college literary courses. It deserves its place as a classic.

The story was fascinating, the characters were believable, the tales, the many colorful sub-plots and the suspense in the action were superb. Mark Twain’s descriptions of the environment along the Mississippi River are more than just interesting, they are a pleasure to read. I think everyone should read the book. It’s available free on the Internet. Just visit guttenberg.org.

Then, tonight on TV I watched the 1939 movie, starring Mickey Rooney as a youngster. I am positive that Mark Twain is still turning over in his grave since the movie was made. Although Rooney and the other actors did a good job of depicting the characters, the movie had little if any resemblance to the actual story in the book. It had none of the truly interesting material. The main part of the story was left out (Finn and Tom Sawyer re-uniting and Tom planning an absurd scheme to free the slave Jim, although he knew Jim had alread been set free by his former owner). Twain’s unique descriptive phrases were absent, and the subtle dialogues were non-existent. It just wasn’t the same mental experience.

Twain used dialects and anachronisms of his day throughout the book. Some narrow-minded academic leaders have banned the book because it uses the term niggars throughout the story. You know what? Everyone, including the slaves themselves and, and the freed slaves called them niggars in those days. It was not a derogatory term, it was simply what all the people called the negroes at the time the book was written.

Mark Twain recognized the reality of slavery being wrong, and anyone reading the book realizes this very quickly within the book. The entire story revolves around a slave wrongly accused of a crime and many people, including Huck Finn, helping him to become free.

The antics of four people in the story are what keeps you the reader fascinated — Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and the two con men The King and The Duke.

As a pragmatic author, I am not offended by the Hollywood touch, but I bemoan the fact that so many millions of people have been duped into believing that what they saw on the screen was what Mark Twain wrote.

Years ago I rented a spare office in my advertising agency to a successful Hollywood writer of the time. His name was Richard DeRoy. He was handed the job of writing a series of screen plays of the bestseller book Peyton Place. I asked Richard what he thought of the book in general, and he replied he had never read the book and did not intend to read it. He only asked the names of the main characters. He invented everything in the TV scripts. The TV series was successful, but the stories and episodes bore no resemblance whatsoever to the book. That’s Hollywood!

storms.  It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and

lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a

little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of

wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the

leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set

the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next,

when it was just about the bluest and blackest–FST! it was as bright as

glory, and you’d have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about away

off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see

before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you’d hear the thunder let

go with an awful crash, and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling, down

the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels

down stairs–where it’s long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you

know.

………Do you know who? It was Mark Twain and he wrote it more than a hundred years ago.  It’s an excerpt from The Advertures of Huckelberry Finn.

I alerted you back in August about Mark Twain’s secret autobiography to be released this year. Well, it has been printed and widely accepted by the public — so wildly that the publisher, the University of California, got caught with its pants down. They didn’t print nearly enough books. People are standing in line to buy a copy to read and/or give as a Christmas gift but prospects are dim. The book stores are sold out.

One of his most famous quotes: “Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

On Nov. 30, 1835, the small town of Florida, Missouri witnessed the birth of its most famous son, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, one of six siblings. The family later moved to Hannibal, a port on the Mississippi River. As a teenager, Twain worked as an apprentice printer. Later, as a riverboat pilot, he earned from $150 to $250 a month, a tidy sum those days.

Prior to adopting Mark Twain as his pen name, Clemens wrote a number of humorous pieces under the pen name Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass. He died peacefully on April 21, 1910  in Redding Connecticut and is buried in New York state.

Haley’s Comet was visible in the sky on the night that Mark Twain was born and again on the night he passed away.  He made note of the birth date and said he wanted to die on the day he did pass away.

His classic trio of books that have been cherished for more than a hundred years are Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Life On The Mississippi.

Ernest Hemingway had this to say about him:  “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”

“Sally could hold her own head high. Completely accepted as a war-widow, she was a part of the respectable society in town. Madge, however, wore a badge of shame. In the convoluted thinking of most of the town’s women, Madge was to be shunned. Even though Madge was an innocent victim of a cheating husband, she was guilty in the eyes of the judgmental women — guilty of being unable to hold onto her man. That was a mandatory trait expected of all Southern women of the time. It was their deep seated fear that the same thing could happen to them that made them keep her at more than an arm’s length away. The only worse situation was to be an adulteress and get caught, like Sadie Summers.”

That’s only one tiny bit of the novel. Men like the parts about the autombile business, with emphasis on the Modell A Ford, and how business was actually conducted in those days.

Everyone, men and women, like the various characters in the book.

As the young people met the traveling Yankee youngsters they discovered there were no important differences between them after all except for verbal accents. The adults also started finding out that the folks from the North were almost exactly like the folks in Oakswood in most respects. Many of them were actually quite polite and well mannered, not at all crude or cruel as they had been led to believe for so many years. There were two big differences though that identified a Northerner at once. The Yankees always seemed to be in an awful big hurry, and they didn’t seem to respect their ladies properly. They did not understand the laid back pace of traditional Southern life. They had been led to believe that all Southerners were sluggish, lazy and backward. They couldn’t seem to fathom the idea that fast thinking could be linked to slow motion, which typified many Southerners.

The Model A Ford figures prominently in the book.

BUT, remember short stories?

I just finished reading a short story by Mark Twain this afternoon. Very good reading, even though he wrote it about a hundred years ago.

Maybe short stories are making a comeback. Check it out.

Short stories are beginning to appear on the Ebook menus. Download one or two from Amazon or B&Noble and experience for yourself the pleasure of reading an entertaining story.

It’s a good way to take a break.

Although the E-Book Reader was invented almost 40 years ago at the Xerox research center near Palo Alto, it’s only been lately that the hand-held reading devices have begun to become “mainstream” – mostly because of new developments in the display screens.

The Kindle, by Amazon, started the race.  Now there are more than a dozen viable competitors to Kindle.  The Sony Reader, the Apple Reader, and most notably the new Barnes & Nobel NOOK are already giving almighty Amazon a real run for its money.  A dozen more models from Best Buy and other manufacturers are available right now.  Thin and lightweight, they all let you read books online, anywhere, picking up their signal from the Wireless Internet.

Sales are skyrocketing, and hundreds of thousands of new books are available for downloading and reading, at amazingly low cost.

Google makes public domain books available for free.  Many wanabe new authors publish their works online for free – no cost to the author, no cost to the reader.  Novels, non-fictions, textbooks, instruction manuals, business how-to books, and children’s books are waiting for you to press a button and wait only a few seconds for your book to appear – yours to keep, stored in the handheld reader.

I just published my latest book on this medium.  It’s called How to Graduate from Self Employment. You can sample the book on your PC or on most of these new E-book readers.  You will find copious mention of it on Google and Bing.

I plan to publish my recent paperback novel No More An Island online before Thanksgiving.  It will remain available as a printed book.  My plan is to publish the Graduate book as a paperback also, if it demonstrates a market.

To read about and sample the Graduate book, Click Here.