Roy Jr. Morris's Books

Lighting Out for the Territory

How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain

By: Roy Jr. Morris

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Lighting Out for the Territory

How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain

By: Roy Jr. Morris

In the very last paragraph of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the title character gloomily reckons that it’s time “to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.” Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally is trying to “sivilize” him, and Huck Finn can’t stand it—he’s been there before. It’s a decision Huck’s creator already had made, albeit for somewhat different reasons, a quarter of a century earlier. He wasn’t even Mark Twain then, but as Huck might have said, “That ain’t no matter.” With the Civil War spreading across his native Missouri, twenty-five-year-old Samuel Clemens, suddenly out of work as a Mississippi riverboat pilot, gladly accepted his brother Orion’s offer to join him in Nevada Territory, far from the crimsoned battlefields of war. A rollicking, hilarious stagecoach journey across the Great Plains and over the Rocky Mountains was just the beginning of a nearly six-year-long odyssey that took Samuel Clemens from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Hawaii, with lengthy stopovers in Virginia City, Nevada, and San Francisco. By the time it was over, he would find himself reborn as Mark Twain, America’s best-loved, most influential writer. The “trouble,” as he famously promised, had begun. With a pitch-perfect blend of appreciative humor and critical authority, acclaimed literary biographer Roy Morris, Jr., sheds new light on this crucial but still largely unexamined period in Mark Twain’s life. Morris carefully sorts fact from fiction—never an easy task when dealing with Twain—to tell the story of a young genius finding his voice in the ramshackle mining camps, boomtowns, and newspaper offices of the wild and woolly West, while the Civil War rages half a continent away. With the frequent help of Twain’s own words, Morris follows his subject on a winding journey of selfdiscovery filled with high adventure and low comedy, as Clemens/Twain dodges Indians and gunfighters, receives marriage advice from Brigham Young, burns down a mountain with a frying pan, gets claim-jumped by rival miners, narrowly avoids fighting a duel, hikes across the floor of an active volcano, becomes one of the first white men to try the ancient Hawaiian sport of surfing, and writes his first great literary success, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Lighting Out for the Territory is a fascinating, even inspiring, account of how an unemployed riverboat pilot, would-be Confederate guerrilla, failed prospector, neophyte newspaper reporter, and parttime San Francisco aesthete reinvented himself as America’s most famous and beloved writer. It’s a good story, and mostly true—with some stretchers thrown in for good measure.

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Page Count

314

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

143910137X

ISBN 13

9781439101377

Fraud of the Century

Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876

By: Roy Jr. Morris

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Fraud of the Century

Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876

By: Roy Jr. Morris

In this major work of popular history and scholarship, acclaimed historian and biographer Roy Morris, Jr, tells the extraordinary story of how, in America’s centennial year, the presidency was stolen, the Civil War was almost reignited, and Black Americans were consigned to nearly ninety years of legalized segregation in the South. The bitter 1876 contest between Ohio Republican governor Rutherford B. Hayes and New York Democratic governor Samuel J. Tilden is the most sensational, ethically sordid, and legally questionable presidential election in American history. The first since Lincoln’s in 1860 in which the Democrats had a real chance of recapturing the White House, the election was in some ways the last battle of the Civil War, as the two parties fought to preserve or overturn what had been decided by armies just eleven years earlier. Riding a wave of popular revulsion at the numerous scandals of the Grant administration and a sluggish economy, Tilden received some 260,000 more votes than his opponent. But contested returns in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina ultimately led to Hayes’s being declared the winner by a specially created, Republican-dominated Electoral Commission after four tense months of political intrigue and threats of violence. President Grant took the threats seriously: he ordered armed federal troops into the streets of Washington to keep the peace. Morris brings to life all the colorful personalities and high drama of this most remarkable—and largely forgotten—election. He presents vivid portraits of the bachelor lawyer Tilden, a wealthy New York sophisticate whose passion for clean government propelled him to the very brink of the presidency, and of Hayes, a family man whose Midwestern simplicity masked a cunning political mind. We travel to Philadelphia, where the Centennial Exhibition celebrated America’s industrial might and democratic ideals, and to the nation’s heartland, where Republicans waged a cynical but effective “bloody shirt” campaign to tar the Democrats, once again, as the party of disunion and rebellion. Morris dramatically recreates the suspenseful events of election night, when both candidates went to bed believing Tilden had won, and a one-legged former Union army general, “Devil Dan” Sickles, stumped into Republican headquarters and hastily improvised a devious plan to subvert the election in the three disputed southern states. We watch Hayes outmaneuver the curiously passive Tilden and his supporters in the days following the election, and witness the late-night backroom maneuvering of party leaders in the nation's capital, where democracy itself was ultimately subverted and the will of the people thwarted. Fraud of the Century presents compelling evidence that fraud by Republican vote-counters in the three southern states, and especially in Louisiana, robbed Tilden of the presidency. It is at once a masterful example of political reporting and an absorbing read.

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Page Count

340

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

1416585451

ISBN 13

9781416585459

Southiere Dit Lagiroflee - Jeffrey

From Generation to Generation with Portraits of the Past

By: Roy W. Jeffrey

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Southiere Dit Lagiroflee - Jeffrey

From Generation to Generation with Portraits of the Past

By: Roy W. Jeffrey

A Jeffrey family genealogy was compiled by Mrs. Clarence Jeffrey Jr. of Webster, NH in 1974 titled The Jeffrey Family of Putney and Westminister, VT, also Walpole, NH originating in Canada. The early records of the attached data have been taken from that genealogy. The data has been updated and corrected through the years and is believed to be an accurate record of the Jeffrey lineage.

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200

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AuthorHouse

Published Date

ISBN 10

1468537423

ISBN 13

9781468537420

Fraud of the Century

Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876

By: Roy Jr. Morris

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Fraud of the Century

Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876

By: Roy Jr. Morris

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

340

Publisher

Simon and Schuster

Published Date

ISBN 10

1416585451

ISBN 13

9781416585459

Book's by Roy Jr. Morris

Lighting Out for the Territory

Lighting Out for the Territory

Fraud of the Century

Fraud of the Century

Southiere Dit Lagiroflee - Jeffrey

Southiere Dit Lagiroflee - Jeffrey

Fraud of the Century

Fraud of the Century

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