Mark Twain

Hundreds of Mark Twain’s highly revealing interviews are at last collected and reprinted in their entirety by Gary Scharnhorst, a milestone event. Under John Bird’s editorship and sponsored by the Mark Twain Circle of America, The Mark Twain Annual publishes eight articles and five reviews in its fourth number. Louis J. Budd reflects on the friendship of Mark Twain and William Dean Howells. Shelley Fisher Fishkin mounts a defense of the dialect stories of both Twain and Paul Laurence Dunbar. A fascinating study examines Twain’s many links with the printing industry. Interpretations of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, among them an intriguing analysis of Pap Finn, continue to dominate the critical conversations, and a new, annotated classroom edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer appears on the scene. Twain’s attitudes toward journalistic news-gathering practices are explored. Joe B. Fulton decodes some marginalia on a Biblical subject. Scholars trace several possible literary and biographical sources within The Mysterious Stranger manuscripts. Bermuda finally receives its due as Mark Twain’s reachable paradise.

i Editions

Few events in Mark Twain scholarship can match the likely long-term impact of Gary Scharnhorst’s monumental Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews (Alabama). Scharnhorst himself seems surprised that “only a fourth of the interviews in this edition have ever been reprinted from their original sources,” despite the earlier efforts by Louis J. Budd to round up the far-flung records of Twain’s brushes with interviewers. As Scharnhorst observes of the 258 interviews transcribed here, “most of them are lost in a biographical and critical blind spot.” Although Twain “understood the utility of interviews for purposes of self-promotion,” Scharnhorst notes that understandably “he preferred to sell his words rather than give them away.” Still, the lure of the spoken word in conversation often overcame Twain’s hesitation. On 20 July 1899, for example, a reporter found Twain in London and enticed him to talk. Twain disclosed that he was writing his autobiography: “Yes, I’m writing as if I were a Rip Van Winkle, and as if the things I remembered as having happened yesterday had really happened 100 years ago. If a publisher should come along and offer me an incredible sum I should say, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’ ” Asked by another reporter, on 22 September 1895, to defend his previous off-the-cuff criticisms of Bret Harte, Twain blamed them on the modus operandi of the typical newspaper interview: “No man who is ever interviewed, perhaps, fails to say things which are not proper things to be said to an unoffending public, and I am not less liable to these mistakes than would be the persons who find fault with me, if they were being interviewed without the opportunity to weigh their words. . . . The offence . . . was committed against the reader; it is that which troubles me, not the offence against Harte himself.” During another interview in 1895 Twain presciently argued that all attempts at alcoholic prohibition in America or Australia were doomed to fail. “When men want drink, they’ll have it in spite of all the laws ever passed. . . . The front door is closed, but the back is opened; instead of open honest drinking, you have sly boozing; instead of having the traffic under the supervision of the law, and conducted in the interests of order and morality, there is no supervision at all, and the trade is conducted under the most demoralizing conditions. The manner in which these absurd liquor laws are broken breeds contempt for law in general.” Throughout this 719-page volume, which includes countless annotations and a detailed index, Twain’s inimitable voice can be heard almost as distinctly as if that fabled recording of him speaking aloud actually existed. Only the smallest libraries or the least inquisitive literary scholars should elect to do without their copy of Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews.

The premier expert on Mark Twain’s western years, Lawrence I. Berkove, captures the robust flavor of that era by collecting nearly 70 humorous sketches, short stories, memoirs, essays, letters, and poems in The Sagebrush Anthology: Literature from the Silver Age...