Authors

The Writings of Mark Twain (1922–25), thirtyseven volumes, edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, is being superseded by the ongoing editions of The Mark Twain Papers and Project (1967–) at the University of California Press under the leadership of Robert Hirst. The Mark Twain Papers series publishes scholarly editions of previously unpublished notebooks, journals, letters, and literary manuscripts; The Works of Mark Twain publishes scholarly editions of previously published works; The Mark Twain Library consists of popularly priced editions with explanatory notes and illustrations; Jumping Frogs: Undiscovered, Rediscovered, and Celebrated Writings of Mark Twain has so far published Is He Dead? A Comedy in Three Acts and Mark Twain’s Helpful Hints for Good Living: A Handbook for the Damned Human Race. The Mark Twain Digital Project makes available an electronic edition of Twain’s letters 1876– 1880. Six volumes of letters (through 1871) have appeared so far in the Papers, and other Twain letters are available in several scattered volumes, the most interesting of which is The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William Dean Howells, 1872–1910 (1960), edited by Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson. Altogether some forty volumes have appeared as part of the Mark Twain Papers and Project. The Library of America has issued in two volumes Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches and Essays (1992) with notes by Louis Budd. A companion volume, with notes by Susan K. Harris, Mark Twain: Historical Romances, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc followed in 1993. Tom Quirk edited a fine selection of Mark Twain: Tales, Speeches, Essays and Sketches (1993). Marlene Boyd Vallen’s Mark Twain: Propagandist for the Popular Culture (1992) collects sixteen speeches and commentary. Louis J. Budd’s Mark Twain: The Contemporary Reviews (1999) gives us over six hundred pages of early reviews, from 1867–1817. Most controversial of new editions of Twain’s best-known book the Mark Twain Project edition (2001) which calls itself “The Only Comprehensive Edition” of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; it is edited by ed. Victor Fischer and Lin Salamo and dedicated to Walter Blair, leading scholar of the 1985 Mark Twain Project edition of the novel, who died in 1992. It contains 1164 pages with original drawings by E. W. Kemble and John Harley, but its greatest claim to fame is its use of the first half of Huckleberry Finn manuscript discovered in a Hollywood attic in 1990. The editors collated over 1,100 changes in spelling, punctuation, and other details and one hundred changes in wording, adding Jim’s ghost story and chapter 16, “The Raftsmens’ Passage,” both previously left out. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, New Riverside Editions, gen. ed. Paul Lauter, ed. Susan K. Harris (2005), includes the raftsmen’s passage and critical essays by Victor Doyno, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Norman Mailer, and Toni Morrison. Other new editions or publications include Twain’s previously unpublished story, “A Murder, A Mystery, and a Marriage,” unpublished Twain story, introduced by Roy Blount, Jr., Atlantic Monthly (2001); The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain, edited by Lawrence I. Berkove (2004); and The Portable Mark Twain edited by Tom Quirk (2004). A new journal, the Mark Twain Annual, was founded by the Mark Twain Circle in 2003; its 2005 issue featured a Special Section on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Tom Tenney supplies ongoing bibliographical updates in American Literary Realism and in the Mark Twain Circular, updating his 1977 Mark Twain: A Reference Guide. A Companion to Mark Twain, ed. Peter Messent and Louis Budd, (2005); an expansion of the 1981 The Annotated Huckleberry Finn, ed. Michael Patrick Hearn (2001); David E. E. Sloane’s Student Companion to Mark Twain (2001); Making Mark Twain Work in the Classroom, ed. James M. Leonard (1999), which covers challenges that confront instructors, especially slavery, women’s roles, and religious satire; and Mark Twain A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Writings by R. Kent Rasmussen (2006), which offers nearly 1,300 entries devoted primarily to proper names relating to Twain, round out the reference and teaching shelf. Albert Bigelow Paine’s Mark Twain, a Biography (1912) is vivid, unreliable, and still indispensable. Justin Kaplan’s Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, a Biography (1966) is a lively, popular account. Van Wyck Brooks’s polemical and controversial The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920) should be read together with Bernard De Voto’s corrective Mark Twain’s America (1932). De Lancey Ferguson’s Mark Twain: Man and Legend (1943) is a fine full-length critical biography, as is Everett Emerson’s Mark Twain: A Literary Life (2000), an expanded and updated version of his earlier The Authentic Mark Twain: A Literary Biography of Samuel L. Clemens (1984), a trusted guide to Twain’s literary life. Jeffrey Steinbrink’s Getting to Be Mark Twain (1991) examines the period 1868– 71. Mark Twain: A Life by Ron Powers (2005) gives us another biography; Powers, who wrote about Twain’s Missouri childhood in Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain (2001) aims to define Twain as a “representative man” of his times and offer a full portrait of Twain in his many roles and phases of life. In The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography (2005), Fred Kaplan attempts something quite different. Kaplan sees Twain, in contrast to many biographers such as Justin Kaplan, as a singular personality (not multiple or divided), his two names indicating no deep internal division of identity. Twain’s contradictions are those of any fine mind. Jason Gary Horn attempts to sort out all the current biographies in Mark Twain: A Descriptive Guide to Biographical Sources (1999). Criticism on Twain is enormous in quantity, variety, and quality. Two excellent general studies are Henry Nash Smith’s Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (1962) and William M. Gibson’s The Art of Mark Twain (1976). James M. Cox’s perceptive Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (1966), Edgar M. Branch’s The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain (1950), and Albert E. Stone’s The Innocent Eye: Childhood in Mark Twain’s Imagination (1961) are distinguished early contributions to serious Twain scholarship. More recent studies of permanent interest include Louis J. Budd’s Our Mark Twain: The Making of His Public Personality (1983), James L. Johnson’s Mark Twain and the Limits of Power: Emerson’s God in Ruins (1982), Sherwood Cummings’s excellent Mark Twain and Science: Adventures of a Mind (1989), Susan Gillman’s Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America (1991), Maria Ornella Marotti’s The Duplicating Imagination: Twain and the Twain Papers (1991), and David E. E. Sloane’s Mark Twain as a Literary Comedian (1979). Carl Dolmetsch’s Our Famous Guest: Mark Twain in Vienna (1992) argues against the conventional wisdom concerning the decline of Twain’s creativity after the mid-1890s. The title of Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s Was Huck Black?: Mark Twain and African-American Voices (1993) suggests its interesting argument that Twain’s model for Huck was a young black friend of his. Fishkin’s Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture (1996) raises fascinating questions about race and the way Twain’s writing personas have been appropriated and misappropriated by popular culture. Several volumes take a fresh look at Twain’s humor: Don Florence, Persona and Humor in Mark Twain’s Early Writings (1995); Stuart Hutchison, Mark Twain: Humor on the Run (1994); Patricia M. Mandia, Comedic Pathos: Black Humor in Twain’s Fiction (1991); Bruce Michelson, Mark Twain on the Loose: A Comic Writer and the American Self (1995); and Mark Twain’s Humor: Critical Essays (1992), edited by David E. E. Sloane. Several books address Twain’s attitudes toward womenin and out of his writings: Laura E. Skandera- Trombley’s Mark Twain in the Company of Women (1994), J. D. Stahl’s Mark Twain, Culture and Gender: Envisioning America Through Europe (1993), Peter Stoneley’s Mark Twain and the Feminine Aesthetic (1992), and Resa Willis’s Mark and Livy: The Love Story of Mark Twain and the Woman Who Almost Tamed Him (1992). Other studies of note include Gregg Camfield’s Sentimental Twain: Samuel Clemens in the Maze of Moral Philosophy (1994), Guy Cardwell’s The Man Who Was Mark Twain: Images and Ideologies (1991), Randall Knoper’s Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance (1995), and David R. Sewell’s Mark Twain’s Languages: Discourse, Dialogue, and Linguistic Variety (1987). Among the many collections of criticism, Robert Sattlemeyer and J. Donald Crowley’s One Hundred Years of “Huckleberry Finn”: The Boy, His Book, and American Culture (1985) merits special notice. Victor Doyno’s painstaking study Writing “Huck Finn”: Mark Twain’s Creative Process (1991) will soon be revised to incorporate the discovery of the first half of the Huckleberry Finn manuscript. More recent critical studies have included Hilton Obenzinger’s American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania (1999); Black, White, and Huckleberry Finn: Reimagining the the American Dream by Elaine Mensh and Harry Mensh (2000); Refiguring Huckleberry Finn, Carl F. Wieck (2000); Peter Messent’s The Short Works of Mark Twain: A Critical Study (2001); the sequel to Mark Twain and His Illustrators, vol. 1 (1869–1875), by Beverly R. David, vol. 2, Mark Twain and His Illustrators, (1875–1883), which appeared in 2001; Louis J. Budd’s 1962 Mark Twain: Social Philosopher, reprinted (2001) in the Mark Twain and His Circle Series edited by Tom Quirk; Searching for Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens’s World by Terrell Dempsey (2003); Mark Twain: A Short Introduction by Stephen Railton (2003); Joseph L. Coulombe, Mark Twain and the American West (2003); Mark Twain and Company: Six Literary Relations by Leland Krauth (2003), which covers Twain’s relationships with William Dean Howells, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Bret Harte, Harriett Beecher Stowe, and Matthew Arnold; and Mark Twain in Paradise: His Voyages to Bermuda, Donald Hoffmann (2006). Among the several recent collections of criticism the following warrant attention: James S. Leonard, Thomas A. Tenney and Thadious M. Davis’s edited Satire or Evasion?: Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn (1996), Tom Quirk’s Coming to Grips with Huckleberry Finn: Essays on a Book, a Boy, and a Man (1992), Eric J. Sundquist’s Mark Twain: A Collection of Critical Essays (1994), Laurie Champion’s The Critical Response to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1991), Forrest G. Robinson’s The Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain (1995), Laura Skandera-Trombley and Michael J. Kiskis’s Constructing Mark Twain: New Directions in Scholarship (2001), containing thirteen essays saluting Hamlin Hill’s 1974 challenge to scholars, “Who Killed Mark Twain?” J. R. Le Master and James Wilson edited The Mark Twain Encyclopedia (1992), with 180 contributors and 740 entries. R. Kent Rasmussen’s claim in the title of his Mark Twain A-Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Writings (1996) is justified by its 1,300 factual entries.

Samuel L. Clemens grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, the river town that inspired his most famous tales of boyhood adventure. His father died when the boy was only twelve, and young Clemens soon went to work as a printer's apprentice to help support the family. Printing and journalism became his best sources of income, and as he grew older and traveled across the country, Clemens began to write humorous sketches for such diverse papers as the Keokuk Saturday Post, the Territorial Enterprise, the Sacramento Union, and the New York Tribune. The pen name he adopted for his writing--Mark Twain--meant "two fathoms deep" or "safe water," a term he had learned as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi. Clemens's unique wit and knack for colloquial speech made such titles as Innocents Abroad (1869), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1883), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1894) instant American classics. Huckleberry Finn in particular is notable for the richness of its portrayals and for its complex presentations of issues such as family, race, and slavery.