Benjamin Franklin, Citizen: A One-Man Performance Cassette Tape

Ben Franklin's wisdom is just as potent now as it was over 200 years ago. A Founding Father of the United States, he was also a world citizen, a philosopher, author, and scientist. Fredd Wayne's brilliant performance reveals his genius with a sense of proportion that carefully balances excerpts from Franklin's public writings and his private correspondence. In this exclusive audio production, Ben Franklin speaks to us all. 1 cassette.

Mark Twain is the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910). Writer, journalist, lecturer, he was born in Florida, Mo., grew up along the Mississippi River. He left school at age 12 and worked as a printer (1847--57), then as a Mississippi riverboat pilot (1857--61). In 1863 he took as his pen name the call used when sounding the river shallows, "Mark twain!" referring to two fathoms. In 1861, after a few unhappy weeks as a Confederate volunteer, he went to Nevada where he tried gold mining and then edited a newspaper. In 1864 he went to San Francisco as a reporter and achieved his first success with "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1865). He won wide popularity with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1882), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), but it was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) that eventually became regarded as a seminal work of American literature. In his final years he was greatly honored, and his opinions on everything were sought out by the public, but the posthumous publication of his autobiography (1924) revealed the dim, indeed dark view he held of his fellow humans.