Mark Twain: A Biography (American Men and Women of Letters) [Library Binding]

Albert Bigelow Paine (Author), Daniel Aaron (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0791045390 | ISBN-13: 978-0791045398 | Publication Date: March 1997

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II THE FORTUNES OF JOHN AND JANE CLEMENS WITH all his ability and industry, and with the best of intentions, John Clemens would seem to have had an unerring faculty for making business mistakes. It was his optimistic outlook, no doubt—his absolute confidence in the prosperity that lay just ahead—which led him from one unfortunate locality or enterprise to another, as long as he lived. About a year after his marriage he settled with his voting wife in Gainsborough, Tennessee, a mountain town on the Cumberland River, and here, in 1825, their first child, a boy, was born. They named him Orion—after the constellation, perhaps—though they changed the accent to the first syllable, calling it Orion. Gainsborough was a small place with few enough law cases; but it could hardly have been as small, or furnished as few cases, as the next one selected, which was Jamestown, Fentress County, still farther toward the Eastward Mountains. Yet Jamestown had the advantage of being brand new, and in the eye of his fancy John Clemens doubtless saw it the future metropolis of east Tennessee, with himself its foremost jurist and citizen. He took an immediate and active interest in the development of the place, established the county-seat there, built the first Court House, and was promptly elected as circuit clerk of the court. It was then that he decided to lay the foundation of a fortune for himself and his children by acquiring Fentress County land. Grants could be obtained in those daysat the expense of less than a cent an acre, and John Clemens believed that the years lay not far distant when the land would increase in value ten thousand, twenty, perhaps even a hundred thousandfold. There was no wrong estimate in that. Land covered with the finest primeval timber, and filled with precious ...

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Library Binding: 1718 pages
• Publisher: Chelsea House Pub (L) (March 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791045390
• ISBN-13: 978-0791045398
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.2 x 4.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,601,079 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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