Mark Twain and Youth: Studies in His Life and Writings ed. by Kevin Mac Donnell and R. Kent Rasmussen (review)

Can more be said about Mark Twain and childhood? "Yes!" according to the editors of this collection. But this does not mean that what is being said is new. The "Dear Youth" (Olivia Clemens's pet name for her husband) presented in this collection of essays is a portrait for the Twain fan rather than the Twain scholar.

The contributors to this collection are respected scholars from across the US and Europe with extensive publications on Twain, including such notables in the field of Twain studies as Lawrence Berkove, Alan Gribben, Victor Fischer, and Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Equally represented are professionals associated with the Twain industry that includes the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum in Hannibal, Missouri, and the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut. In addition, Twain publishing concerns—an annual, a journal, a circular, and the scholarly University of California Mark Twain Papers and Project—are well represented. The collection is introduced with a foreword by none other than Hal Holbrook, the face of Twain's life and writing as a cultural phenomenon.

The essays included in this collection are organized into five sections: "Overviews," "The Clemens Family," "Sam Clemens's Life Experiences," "Mark Twain's Writings," and "Modern Perspectives." Each writer hews closely to the overall themes of the collection: Twain's relationship with young people in his private and public life, and the portraits of young people in his writing. The biographical essays focus exclusively on Sam Clemens's childhood and the childhood and youth of the Clemens children. Even the essays in the "Overviews" section, which is more expansive, stay focused on that theme. The best of the latter group, by ChLA's own Lucy Rollin (emerita from Clemson University), provides a cogent discussion of the context for children's literature in nineteenth-century America, including the influential trans-Atlantic texts that Twain would have known. The novels by Twain that receive extended discussion in essays of their own include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, and Pudd'nhead Wilson. The final section includes two essays discussing the successful use of Twain's fiction in contemporary middle and high schools and an essay on film adaptations of his novels.

The breadth of scholarly and professional interests represented in the collection suggests—and the individual chapters confirm—that its intended audience is general rather than academic, appreciative rather than skeptical. This perspective is most immediately apparent in Holbrook's foreword. Reminiscent of his stage performances as Twain, the foreword is colloquial, loosely organized, and curmudgeonly. In contrast to the contributors of chapters, who remain focused on the theme, Holbrook comments unrestrainedly on a number of topics. He rails against contemporary publishing for children (books "splashed with cartoon color they hawk to kids and mommas today"), cell phones ("Today the young minds being trained-up to run the Western world are nose deep in cell phones communicating with other young geniuses about girls and football"), and a supposed absence of proper historical awareness ("Who was Abraham Lincoln? Answer me that") (xv). In this piece Holbrook also engages with topics addressed in some of the essays included in the collection. His comments related to Mark Dawidziak's essay on film adaptations devolve into a rant against Hollywood: "They are afraid of anything that rises above the level of box office perfume and that has killed more good stuff in our literature-to-film agenda than anything else" (xiii). Holbrook's commentary on Gribben's essay "Mark Twain's Lifelong Reading" provides an opportunity to bemoan the contemporary lack of the shared novel reading that constituted the literary experience of many nineteenthcentury families. His response to Fishkin's "Black and White Youth in Twain's Hannibal" becomes an occasion to ramble, somewhat incoherently, about Twain's feelings regarding the Civil War...