This is a book that really will inform and inspire.

The very fact that Mark Twain wrote this book and wrote it the way he did is a powerful testimony to the attractive power of the Catholic Church's saints. Instead one finds a remarkably accurate biography of the life and mission of Joan of Arc told by one of this country's greatest storytellers. Because of Mark Twain's antipathy to institutional religion, one might expect an anti-Catholic bias toward Joan or at least toward the bishops and theologians who condemned her.

He reached his conclusion about Joan's unique place in history only after studying in detail accounts written by both sides, the French and the English. He spent twelve years in research and many months in France doing archival work and then made several attempts until he felt he finally had the story he wanted to tell. Still fewer know that he considered it not only his most important but also his best work. One whose character even that old curmudgeon Twain judged to be “ flawless.” Joan deserves to be remembered for who she really was.Very few people know that Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) wrote a major work on Joan of Arc. No, not a “misfit.” An amazing individual. And with her little hand that child of seventeen struck him down and yonder he lies stretched on the field of Patay, and will not get up any more while this old world lasts.” It was an ogre, that war, an ogre that went about for near a hundred years, crunching men and dripping blood from its jaws. At Orleans she struck it a staggering blow on the field of Patay she broke its back. . . In seven weeks she hopelessly crippled that gigantic war that was ninety-one years old. Then began the briefest and most amazing campaign that is recorded in history. Friedman Mark Twain Collection (Library of Congress) DLC Publication date 1919 Topics Joan, of Arc, Saint, 1412-1431, Christian women saints Publisher New York : Harper & Bros. Mark Twains favorite of all his works in a. Saint Joan of Arc by Twain, Mark, 1835-1910 Pyle, Howard, 1853-1911 Roy J. Now came the ignorant country maid out of her remote village and confronted this hoary war, this all-consuming conflagration that had swept the land for three generations. The 1896 edition featuring all the original vintage illustrations I like Joan of Arc best of all my books.

Take the words of Mark Twain, whose last completed novel (what he called a labor of love) was “ Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.” Twain summed up Joan’s impact as only he could: “France was a wreck, a ruin, a desolation.

Mark twain and joan of arc