{"id":33746,"date":"2016-05-17T10:00:45","date_gmt":"2016-05-17T15:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=33746"},"modified":"2016-05-12T17:28:05","modified_gmt":"2016-05-12T22:28:05","slug":"richard-zacks-signing-chasing-the-last-laugh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/richard-zacks-signing-chasing-the-last-laugh\/","title":{"rendered":"Richard Zacks Signing Chasing The Last Laugh"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Zacks<\/strong>, bestselling author of The Pirate Hunter<\/em>, Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York<\/em>, and others, will be at Off Square Books<\/strong> on Thursday, May 19<\/strong> at 5 pm to read from his latest book, Chasing the Last Laugh: Mark Twain\u2019s Raucous and Redemptive Round-the-World Comedy Tour<\/em>, a rich and lively account of how Mark Twain\u2019s <\/strong>late-life adventures abroad help to save his family from financial ruin.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1894, Mark Twain was the highest paid author in America. By the end of 1895, due to a series of poor investments\u2013e.g., buying a publishing house and putting his nephew in charge and backing James W. Paige\u2019s pie-in-the-sky mechanical typesetter and the critical and commercial failures of his recent novels\u2014he was not only dead broke, but neck-deep in debt. Twain\u2019s wife, coal heiress Olivia \u201cLivy\u201d Langdon<\/strong>, took the setback particularly hard, believing \u201cthat business failure means disgrace.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Twain vowed to his wife that he would pay back every single penny. So, at the ripe age of fifty-nine, when most literary icons would be telling jokes at fancy dinner parties, Twain embarked on a round-the-world stand-up comedy tour that would take him across the American West, across the Pacific to Australia, India, South Africa, and beyond. He was the first author to ever attempt such a tour. He picked his best stories and wove them into a ninety-minute performance which helped to drum up thousands of dollars to pay the creditors.<\/span><\/p>\n

Richard Zacks thoroughly combed through the numerous notebooks Twain kept while on tour\u2014which detailed his broad range of interests: \u201creligious preferences in ant colonies, worst public floggings, the anonymity of executioners, the insecurities of God\u201d\u2014to produce his highly entertaining narrative. He depicts Twain as a \u201ccomplicated, vibrant individual, and showcases the biting wit and skeptical observation that made him one of the greatest of all American writers.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0\"The<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard Zacks, bestselling author of The Pirate Hunter, Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s Doomed Quest to Clean Up<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":239,"featured_media":33747,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2239],"tags":[821,822,8558,4368,448,4,8556,8562],"class_list":["post-33746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-literary-events","tag-book-signing","tag-books","tag-chasing-the-last-laugh","tag-mark-twain","tag-off-square-books","tag-oxford","tag-richard-zacks","tag-world-tour"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/2016-05-02-Chasing-the-last-laugh.jpg?fit=620%2C349&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/239"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}