Mark Twain

I have produced the Mark Twain essay for American Literary Scholarship fifteen times now, and I have seldom seen such productivity and significance as 2010 yielded. Virtually all periods and genres of Twain's writings attracted scholarly attention, with results that will be felt for decades to come. The major event is undoubtedly the arrival of the first volume of the Mark Twain Project's edition of his Autobiography in its 736-page glory. However, it is also a bumper year for Twain biographies, yielding a major comprehensive survey of his life and two revelatory biographies focused on his final years. A thoughtful examination of Mark Twain's shift from pro-Confederacy to pro-Union sentiments finally emerges. Twain's views of African American slaves' cultural beliefs are highlighted and defended. Future biographers will benefit from a revealing compendium of candid reminiscences by those who knew Twain best. A forceful case is made for revising the assumption that Mark Twain rapidly and permanently outgrew the religious outlines of his Hannibal upbringing. Two exhibition catalogues serve up new Twain materials. Excellent articles on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn advance our understanding of that novel. Several articles probe the philosophical connections and the larger implications of selected works. Some of Twain's lesser-studied late works receive their due.

i Editions

Mark Twain left his attempts at writing and (mainly) dictating his Autobiography in such jumbled disorder and varying draft versions that many scholars, including me, had frankly wondered whether any definitive edition would ever be feasible. However, Harriet Elinor Smith and the editorial team at the Mark Twain Project of the Bancroft Library in Berkeley miraculously bring out Volume 1 of the Autobiography of Mark Twain (Calif.), replete with photographs, explanatory notes, facsimile illustrations, and editorial commentaries. The organization of the volume initially seems as formless as Twain's own rather bizarre concept of how he should relate his life story. This is the author, after all, who said of one series of his recollections, "[This is] a fragment of one of my many attempts . . . to put my life on paper. Its plan is the old, old, old unflexible and difficult one—the plan that starts you at the cradle and drives you straight for the grave, with no side-excursions permitted on the way. Whereas the side-excursions are the life of our life-voyage, and should be, also, of its history." Several reviews of the volume lament its episodic nature, finding it unsatisfactory as an armchair "read," especially the long, jumbled section titled by the editors as "Preliminary Manuscripts and Dictations, 1870-1905," which jumps around from General Grant to Horace Greeley to Henry H. Rogers and other Twain acquaintances. Twain's autobiographical dictations to a stenographer, which began on 9 January 1906, are themselves whimsical in their choice of topics. Sometimes a newspaper item starts him reminiscing aloud about his early impressions of a fellow writer or a national occurrence, and away he goes through a series of barely connected memories.

For the general reader, though, this volume offers a prominent author's front-row view of an exciting three-quarters of a century of literary, political, and social history. For the admirers of Twain's prose style, what saves virtually all of these stabs at an autobiography is that inimitable narrative voice he had developed by the time he came to set down these memories. And for the scholar, the inestimable bonus—in addition to the editors' helpful identifications of the people mentioned—is the marvelously detailed index that concludes the volume. We can never entirely capture the restless and often self-contradictory genius of Mark Twain, but in this editorial venture we begin at last to catch and box up for future use some of his best phrases about his contemporaries and the society they inhabited. The editors deserve much commendation for their patience and courage in tackling this daunting challenge to collect the shards and chunks of Twain's impressions in such a handy—if still incorrigibly shapeless—printed form.

A lavishly illustrated catalogue of manuscripts and photographs held by the Morgan Library and Museum and...