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Charles Dickens

There is much talk today about online piracy, but 19th century authors like Melville, Dickens, and Poe struggled financially because of the lack of international copyright law.

“Yes, I read the illegal translation,” a Czech Internet correspondent known as “Hustey” wrote last summer, when the next, eagerly awaited book in J. K.

Hal Holbrook has lived with him nearly as long as Samuel Clemens did, and he explains why Twain still has the power to delight and to disturb.

Beginning with a lecture in St. Louis in 1867, Mark Twain’s great career as a public speaker spanned about 40 years. But, thanks to his avatar Hal Holbrook, he has gone on amusing and instructing and scolding us for another half-century on stages all over the world.

150 years ago, a sea of grass spread from the Ohio to the Rockies. Now, only bits and pieces of that awesome wilderness remain for the traveler to discover.

Behind my grandparents’ house, the house in which I was born, rose a high pasture, little used in my boyhood and then only for grazing a few head of cattle.

How the Philadelphia waterworks became a potent symbol of our lost belief that nature and technology could live together in harmony

Charles Dickens apparently found little to beguile him when he visited Philadelphia in the 1840’s.

The Literary Lights Were Always Bright at

Everyone wanted to be invited to 148 Charles Street, where Charles Dickens mixed the punch and taught the guests parlor games, John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe vied in telling ghost stories, and Nathaniel Hawthorne paced the bedroom floor one unhappy night in t

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