A Quote by David Oshinsky

I read Norman Lock’s The Boy in His Winter with delight and amazement. Styled in the vernacular of a rapidly changing America, it stays true to the themes of Mark Twain’s original: class relations, race and slavery, childhood innocence, moral hypocrisy—and, of course, the stark beauty and unforgiving nature of America’s greatest river. I finished this absolutely elegant narrative feeling that Huck Finn has never been more alive.

David Oshinsky

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Absolutely Alive Amazement America Beauty Been Boy Changing Childhood Class Course Delight Elegant Feeling Finished Greatest His Hypocrisy Innocence Lock Mark Moral More Narrative Nature Never Norman Original Race Rapidly Read Relations River Slavery Stark Stays Themes True Twain Unforgiving Vernacular Winter

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David Oshinsky
American - Historian
Born: 1944

Mark Twain didn't psychoanalyze Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer. Dickens didn't put Oliver Twist on the couch because he was hungry! Good copy comes out of people, Johnny, not out of a lot of explanatory medical terms.

Samuel Fuller

Mark Twain was an artist working at the highest level. He wrote a book, his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that put America on the world stage for literature. It's almost as if, if you start reading that book as a racist, you cannot finish it and still be a racist.

Val Kilmer

In my early teens, I read every bound volume of the magazine Punch. Every writer of any distinction in the English language, and I mean including America and England, at some time wrote for Punch. Jerome K. Jerome, who wrote Three Men In A Boat, I loved. I was very impressed when I read a piece by Mark Twain in Punch, and realized that despite the fact that they were on different continents, Jerome K. Jerome and Mark Twain had the same kind of laconic, laid-back, "The human race is damn stupid, but quite interesting" attitude. They were almost talking with the same voice.

Terry Pratchett

A heartwarming tale of Christmas past that's chock full of all the wit and hilarity we admire in America's favorite humorist--Mark Twain. Carlo DeVito brings us back one hundred years to a magical time in Twain's family life, revealing a house that's brimming with love and laughter, as well as the profound heartbreaks of life. A Mark Twain Christmas only deepens our understanding and respect for both the man and his work.

Gilbert King

[Mark] Twain called Congress "the only distinctly native criminal class in America. We've lately sent a United States Senator to the penitentiary." That was a fact.

Hal Holbrook

I believe in terms of the work that I do, in establishing dialogue about race relations in Latin America, steps on one of the most relevant themes today.

Bocafloja

In terms of America, I think any profound consideration is bound to return us to the notion of twins because, though you certainly can contend there are many Americas, our history has been binary from the beginning, with its hairline fracture down the country's center between what American has wanted to be and what America has been. That fracture is slavery, of course. To some extent it's still slavery, in that collectively we refuse to come to grips with the American fact of slavery.

Steve Erickson

At one point, I was seriously considering playing Huck Finn in a production in Northern Maine in the dead of winter.

David Walton

Mark Dawidziak is as comfy and entertaining a tour guide through the world of Mark Twain as Twain himself was a tour guide through the world. In other words, Mark Twain’s Guide is such a fun read that the only thing dry about it is the ink.

David Bianculli

Samuel Clemens isn't Mark Twain. Mark Twain is Mark Twain. He doesn't become the thing until he creates himself.

Scott McClanahan

So many white people don't want to talk about race; it's uncomfortable. Many reason that slavery happened more than a century ago, and people alive today had nothing to do with it. But the particulars of these stories, from slavery to segregation to civil rights and mass incarceration, are at the marrow of life in America today.

Beth Macy

People read newspapers far more than they read the Word of God and then we wonder way America is in the mess she's in today. This is the Book that made America great, but since it's been kicked out, we've seen America go under and down.

Lester Roloff

Titian and Rembrandt, Monet and Rodin, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, Mark Twain and Henry James, Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop, to name a few. Twain wrote 'Tom Sawyer' at 41 and bettered it with 'Huckleberry Finn' at 50; Wright completed Fallingwater at 72 and worked on the Guggenheim Museum until his death at 91.

David Galenson

Mark Twain is as big as America. He really is.

Val Kilmer

If Mark Twain had had Twitter, he would have been amazing at it. But he probably wouldn't have gotten around to writing Huckleberry Finn.

Andy Borowitz

We are not race blind. Of course we still have racial tensions in this country. But the United States of America has made enormous progress in race relations, and it is still the best place on Earth to be a minority.

Condoleezza Rice

A Quote by David Oshinsky

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