More than discovering an engaging book that beams strong sunlight upon a formative period of Mark Twain’s life, I was grateful to discover an author, Ben Tarnoff, whose observations on any subject I can look forward to reading with pleasure.

There is a fresh new Twain scholar in the house, and I suspect what Albert Bigelow Paine said about Twain could be said about Tarnoff: “He was limitlessly human.” The Boston Globe: “He stacks fifty pages of endnotes at the back of the book but such archival sweat doesn’t show in the prose.” The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers who Reinvented American Literature Midway through The Bohemians, Ben Tarnoff describes the seed. He loved the backcountry’s fibbers and fabulists, but felt no sympathy for its ‘poetical asses.’” Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. In San Francisco he still told lies, but for better reasons: small, funny lies meant to illuminate large, unfunny ones. The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature - Kindle edition by Tarnoff, Ben. On Twain: “Anyone with a fleeting familiarity with his work knew that he rarely told the unvarnished truth. This wasn’t another sarcastic squib of the Bohemian school: it was a fable of the frontier, drawing laughter deep from the country’s diaphragm, changing the course of American literature forever.” On the Calaveras Frog: “The manuscript held nothing less than the Fort Sumter of American letters, exploding in the annihilating blaze of a jumping frog. On Harte as an author: “…he liked being the flea in the region’s boosterish hide.” On Harte as editor: “He wasn’t timid, although he treated his writers with enough tact to dull whatever pain they felt at his incisions.” On Whitman: “The Brooklynite who sang the body electric in sinewy strokes of free verse. On Stoddard: “His mercurial mind never lingered in one place long enough to be properly embalmed by his professors.” Harte handed Stoddard this accolade: “He was as much out of place in this very material country as Pegasus in a quartz mill.”

The bohemians by ben tarnoff