Showing results by narrator "John Howels" in All Categories

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" is an anti-slavery novel by American author Harriet Beecher Stowe, published in 1852. After the publication of "Uncle Tom's Cabin", Southerners accused Stowe of misrepresenting slavery. In order to show that she had neither lied about slavery nor exaggerated the plight of enslaved people, she compiled "The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin". "The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabi"n was published to document the veracity of the depiction of slavery in Stowe's anti-slavery novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin".

"Life on the Mississippi" (1883) is a memoir by Mark Twain of his days as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War, and also a travel book, recounting his trip along the Mississippi River from St. Louis to New Orleans many years after the War.

Set in 1547, "The Prince and the Pauper" tells the story of two young boys who are identical in appearance: Tom Canty, a pauper who lives with his abusive father in Offal Court off Pudding Lane in London, and Prince Edward, son of King Henry VIII. Tom, the youngest boy in a poor family living in London, has always aspired to a better life, encouraged by the local priest. Loitering around the palace gates one day, he sees the Prince Edward of Wales. Tom is nearly caught and beaten by the Royal Guards, but Edward stops them and invites Tom into his palace chamber.

This story was published in 1893, in a bad decade for the United States and also a difficult time for Twain personally, as he was forced into bankruptcy and mourned the death of his favorite daughter, Suzy. The story still brims with confidence and optimism, marking the moment of hope just before Twain turned to the grim stories of his later years.

This collection is bursting with Twain’s legendary wit. The speeches focus on a great number of issues ranging from cigars and tobacco to ladies, politics, courage, health and Russian stutterers... the topics are endlessly diverse, profound and entertaining! Twain was in great demand as a featured speaker, performing solo humorous talks, similar to what would later become stand-up comedy. His wit and satire, in prose and in speech, earned praise from critics and peers.

This travel book humorously chronicles the trip Twain called his "Great Pleasure Excursion," on board the chartered vessel Quaker City through Europe and the Holy Land in 1867. The excursion was billed as a Holy Land expedition, with numerous stops and side trips along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, such as the train excursion from Marseille to Paris for the 1867 Paris Exhibition during the reign of Napoleon III and the Second French Empire, a journey through the Papal States to Rome, a side trip through the Black Sea to Odessa, and finally culminating in an excursion through the Holy Land.

"Roughing It" follows the travels of young Mark Twain through the Wild West during the years 1861-1867. After a brief stint as a Confederate cavalry militiaman, he joined his brother Orion Clemens, who had been appointed Secretary of the Nevada Territory, on a stagecoach journey west. Twain consulted his brother's diary to refresh his memory and borrowed heavily from his active imagination for many stories in the novel.

Chapters from "My Autobiography" refer to a lengthy set of reminiscences, dictated, for the most part, in the last few years of American author Mark Twain's life and left in typescript and manuscript at his death. The Autobiography comprises a rambling collection of anecdotes and ruminations rather than a conventional autobiography. Twain never compiled these writings and dictations into a publishable form in his lifetime.

This incredible collection contains various essays and articles Mark Twain wrote during his lifetime: numerous funny anecdotes like "How I Escaped being Killed in a Duel", travel adventures like "Americans on a Visit to the Emperor of Russia" and "The Esquimau Maiden's Romance", personal writings like "The Hearth of a Humorist", as well as essays about his greatest works such as "How Tom Sawyer Got his Fence Whitewashed"... The listener, amongst all of the above, and other delightful things, also gets to travel all the way from Gibraltar via India to South Africa.