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  • 5 Mark Twain
  • Alan Gribben

After the momentous publishing events of 2003, especially the release of the Mark Twain Project's fullest edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the incredibly inclusive Buffalo and Erie County Public Library CD-ROM version of that novel, replete with facsimile text, computer search, and relevant books and articles, it would have been difficult to imagine that a succeeding year could compare in lasting impact. Nevertheless there are strong ripples of scholarly activity that will be felt in the classroom as well as in the bibliographies of future studies of Twain. Two important collections of Twain's writings reach the trade market. A major biography scrutinizes the pressures and dynamics within Clemens's final household, reaching dramatic new conclusions, and four other biographies make notable contributions. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn continues to elicit contending commentary. Several critics find fault with Ken Burns's documentary film, and there are also attempts to see Twain's last years as more upbeat than Hamlin Hill portrayed them.

i Editions

Lawrence I. Berkove elevates the Modern Library edition of The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain far above the ranks of most paperbound collections of Twain's works. Erudite in its introduction and its notes (where it helpfully glosses biblical references, cryptic allusions, and biographical hints), The Best Short Stories presents an array of Twain's shorter fiction [End Page 93] that should please professors as well as undergraduates. Berkove includes the usual standard pieces—"Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog," "A True Story," "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut," and "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg"—but his 22 selections also sample the brash fun of Twain's early efforts, the polished products of his middle years, and the grim fables and dream visions of his final phase. Thus the volume contains "The Story of the Bad Little Boy" and "Journalism in Tennessee," but also "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" (the newly available, fuller version), "The Great Dark" (an incomplete story), and "The Second Advent." An unusual appendix provides variant versions of "A Private History" and "Jumping Frog," along with Twain's revealing "How to Tell a Story." Berkove insists that "few of Twain's stories are purely funny. Most, carefully read, have a bittersweet quality that is at least as much a part of Mark Twain as his humor." To a refreshing extent The Best Short Stories of Mark Twain lives up to its promising title. College instructors constructing their classroom syllabi now have an up-to-date and comprehensive Modern Library volume among their possible choices for assignment.

Tom Quirk's new edition of the venerable Portable Mark Twain (Penguin) opens, like its popular predecessor edited by Bernard DeVoto in 1946, with "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Also, as with DeVoto's volume, Quirk includes the first American edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (continuing DeVoto's example of adding the "raftsmen's passage" to chapter 16), but from that point multiple dissimilarities become apparent. Where DeVoto ignored The Innocents Abroad, Quirk reprints two chapters of Twain's early travel book, and DeVoto's exclusion of Roughing It is here rectified by the inclusion of three chapters. DeVoto allotted space for only one chapter from A Tramp Abroad, whereas Quirk gives his readers two. But 583 pages can only contain so much material, so this edition of The Portable leaves out The Mysterious Stranger entirely, perhaps not wishing to deal with its complex textual problems. Twain's colorful letters to various correspondents are reduced from 28 to 16; we lose his caustic complaint to the gas company about "your chuckle-headed Goddamned fashion of shutting your Goddamned gas off without giving any notice" and his joshing letter to Andrew Carnegie pleading for $1.50 to buy a hymnbook. But Quirk retains, and even adds to, a series of letters in which Twain fills in the outlines of his professional life, and he also adds new biographical sketches of Twain's correspondents. In place of the dozen omitted [End Page 94] letters Quirk inserts five public speeches that provide a sampling of Twain's inimitable art of banquet addresses. "Fenimore...

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