Roughing It Mark Twain

In 1895, Mark Twain put his formula for how to tell a humorous story down on paper. The speaker should know how and when to deliver the punchline, learn to be apparently indifferent to his own humor, and exhibit mastery of the pause. Some years...

In many of Whitman's Civil War poems, he focuses on dead or wounded soldiers and draws particular attention to grotesque, often disturbing images. In "A March in the Ranks Hard-Prest," he writes, "Surgeons operating, attendants holding lights, the...