personal recollections of joan of arc book

He said he had never seen Twain so cross.

One day he got a chance to tell Twain how much he had enjoyed Tom and Huck. Twain lived in Taylor’s neighborhood when Taylor was a boy. The others needed no preparation and got none.Ī man named Coley Taylor told a story about what Twain said to him about Joan. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. I like Joan of Arc best of all my books, and it is the best I know it perfectly well. This book is such a departure from what we expect from him that he had it published anonymously so readers would judge the book without prejudice. This month we read Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. So they have had a good taste of Mark Twain’s usual style. The result is the story of one of the great women in history told by one of history’s great storytellers.This is part of Diane’s Literature Course II SeriesĮach of the girls in my class has read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and last year we read Life on the Mississippi together. Twain has the fictional de Conte grow up with Joan, and so he is able to tell her story from her early childhood all the way through the trial and execution. To tell Joan’s story, Twain invented a memoirist, Louis de Conte, a fictionalized version of her real-life page, Louis de Contes. Although a work of fiction, Twain’s research was time well spent: the known facts of Joan’s life, and especially the trial, are very accurate in their depiction.

It was, in his words, “the best of all my books,” and became his last finished novel. When he finally decided to write a book about her, he researched it for a dozen years and spent two more years writing it. Twain first became fascinated with Joan as a teenager. After an ill-advised and short-lived truce, Joan is captured by the Burgundians-French nobility who have aligned themselves with the English-and they try her for heresy and burn her at the stake. That army promptly lifts the siege of Orléans, throws the English out of the Loire valley, hands them another significant defeat at Patay, and marches all the way to Reims, where the dauphin is crowned King Charles VII. She manages to take her message to the dauphin, who after some persuasion places her at the head of his army. A young teenage girl hears voices that tell her she will deliver France from England’s oppression during the Hundred Years War. The essential facts regarding Joan of Arc are well known.

Personal recollections of joan of arc book