Summary
These witty and whimsical diaries reflect both Twain's belief in women's equality and his irreverent views of conventional religion. Extracts from Adam's Diary was published first, in 1904 with Fred Strothmann's humorous cartoons of supposedly ancient stone carvings on every left-hand page. Here Twain has a field day with the story of Adam and Eve, playfully placing the Garden of Eden at Niagara Falls, "the honeymoon capital of the world." A companion piece, Eve's Diary was published in 1906, accompanied by the stunning line drawings of Lester Ralph; it was banned in Worcester, Massachusetts, because of its supposedly pornographic illustrations of a prelapsarian Eve. Eve's Diary is both a love story and Clemens' loving eulogy to his deceased wife: "Wheresoever she was, there was Eden." The two diaries never appeared in one volume during Twain's lifetime, despite Twain's desire that they be republished together someday, as they are here, in their entirety, for the first time. Now readers can delight in comparing the decidedly different takes Adam and Eve have on the same memorable events.
Mark Twain was born Samuel L. Clemens in Florida, Missouri on November 30, 1835. He worked as a printer, and then became a steamboat pilot. He traveled throughout the West, writing humorous sketches for newspapers. In 1865, he wrote the short story, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, which was very well received. He then began a career as a humorous travel writer and lecturer, publishing The Innocents Abroad in 1869, Roughing It in 1872, and, Gilded Age in 1873, which was co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner. His best-known works are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mississippi Writing: Life on the Mississippi, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910.
(Bowker Author Biography)
