Twain: Tattered, Trounced, Tortured and Traumatized is a unique collection of twenty classic Mark Twain short stories and anecdotal sketches that have been creatively rewritten and satirized into adult parody form featuring adult content and language. When author Jay Dubya was a New Jersey public school English teacher, he often enjoyed teaching and reading Mark Twain’s influential literature to his sometimes-enlightened middle and high school academic students. Remarkably, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910) was both born and died the same years that Halley’s Comet had made its seventy-five year revolution around the solar system. Clemens acquired his pen name Mark Twain from Mississippi River steamboat terminology of twain being a water depth of two fathoms (twelve feet), the allowable safe level for a riverboat to navigate over a reef or shoal, and the depth was measured by a leadsman who threw a heavy lead weight overboard and then after lifting it out of the river, would mark the twain. Clemens became a successful riverboat pilot under the direction of a captain named Horace Bixby, but after the Civil War broke out, the Mississippi River was closed down to commercial traffic. Being unemployed, Sam Clemens journeyed out west to try his hand at gold prospecting in Nevada and then at newspaper journalism in California. The writer gained international recognition with the publication of his classic humorous short story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, first published in 1865. Mark Twain is generally regarded as a humorist but he is also understood by literary critics as being a serious philosopher and an astute analyzer of the antebellum and post Civil War American society of his time. Twain’s most famous novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Other important Mark Twain works are the books: Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi and Innocents Abroad, and some short literary sketches from the last mentioned three books have been used in organizing this outrageous satire/parody. Twain: Tattered, Trounced, Tortured and Traumatized is author Jay Dubya’s thirty-sixth published book.
