Book Review-Five Stars
How Not to Get Rich: The Financial Misadventures of Mark Twain by Crawford by Alan Pell Crawford
After reading all of Twain’s writings this book was a great way to look into this champion of American story tellers life from a different prospective. I loved the book that gave me a glimpse of this rare personality to see the motivating forces driving him and the financial conundrums he faced, and how he and his family handled them. This book puts a real human face on a one of a kind man...my hero.
EXCERPTS: He was rich. Raised in genteel poverty in small towns in Missouri (when Missouri was still the West), Twain as a grown man had rubbed elbows with the greatest business tycoons of the time. As the author of The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he had seen the world, or much of it. Russian princes and English lords fawned over him. Hundreds of thousands of people bought his books and lined up to hear him speak. With his earnings—and his wife’s inheritance—he had built a startlingly opulent, twenty-five-room mansion in high-toned Hartford, Connecticut.
He could see himself as one of the true benefactors of the era. And it was an era he had named when he chose the title of one of his own bestsellers: The Gilded Age.
The turning point, for him as well as for the riverboats, was the Civil War. He was in New Orleans in April 1861, when President Lincoln announced a blockade of the South, including the Mississippi, and Twain was suddenly out of work. While Bixby stayed on throughout the war, piloting an ironclad Union gunboat, Twain, a Southern sympathizer in his early years, had other ideas.
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