Clemens of the Call: Mark Twain in San Francisco [Hardcover]

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 375 pages
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr; First edition. edition (June 1969)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520013859
• ISBN-13: 978-0520013858
• Product Dimensions: 10.1 x 7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,062,074 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Mark Twain (1835-1910) was an American humorist, satirist, social critic, lecturer and novelist. He is mostly remembered for his classic novels The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The "Lost" Writings of Mark Twain!, February 9, 2005

By 

tjcrewsbooks (Indiana) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Clemens of the Call: Mark Twain in San Francisco (Hardcover)

Clemens of the Call: Mark Twain in San Francisco represents a prolific four months of Twain's early writing career.

"Samuel Clemens reported the city news for the San Francisco Daily Morning Call during approximately four months in 1864. This book examines the relationship between the reporter and his paper,...The pieces reprinted here frequently are interesting for their style and for what they tell us of the author's attitudes and experience. Also they are a record of events in San Francisco during the summer and early fall prior to President Lincoln's reelection. They made good reading then, and by and large they still do today. When a writer as creative as Clemens takes a city like San Francisco for his daily beat, is it surprising that the sparkle remains even a century (and nearly a half!) later?" (From the Preface to this book.)

Clemens of the Call contains nearly 200 pieces appropriately attributed to Twain. As a reporter of local items for the Call, Twain covers The Streets of San Francisco, San Francisco's Chinese, The Theatres, Etc., Crime and The Police Court, and serves as Critic and Political Reporter.
Twain, as reporter, covers the most San Franciscan of all occurances--Earthquakes, and even the absence of earthquakes...

"The earthquakes are getting so irregular. When a community get used to a thing, they suffer when they have to go without it...we know of nothing that will answer as a substitute for one of those convulsions--to an unmarried man."

In many of Twain's pieces we see Twain's satire and use of accepted stereotypes, "employed at that time as much for comic purposes as for the expression of social criticism or of a sense of compassion for the wronged." (quote from the author's text)
Twain's writing is never dull, and never without insight.
This collection is rich!

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant!!, December 25, 2009

By 

Mary Dolling O'Malley "Litterateur" (Parkville, Maryland) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Clemens of the Call: Mark Twain in San Francisco (Hardcover)

For the Twain lover who has gone through the canon of established works, this is a gold-mine (A real one, not just "a hole in the ground with a liar standing over it.") The compiler sorted through the records of the San Francisco Call newspaper for which Samuel Clemens worked for a short time in his career. Using internal stylistic cues, he has culled the unattributed articles of the ones specific to Mark Twain. He undoubtedly hit the nail on the head in every selection he has made. For little vignettes of hilarity posing as news, this cannot be beat!! Mark Twain oozes from every article in this volume to the great satisfaction of his readers who are left hungry for a little bit more. Enjoy!