Editor’s Re: Marks

Last year I turned fifty. Instead of buying a convertible, jumping for joy, or jumping from an airplane (with a parachute), I jumped deeper into my work. In fact, two months before my fiftieth birthday I was named director of the Core Curriculum at my home institution, and in that same month I accepted the editorship of the Mark Twain Annual. The former core director at Dominican sized up my new work situation best when he presented me with an early birthday gift: a framed photograph of Evel Knievel astride his famous red, white, and blue Harley. On the back of the photo’s frame my colleague had written the following: “You have to be passionate and a little bit crazy to do what you’re doing.” Passionate? Yes. Crazy? Maybe.

Twain at fifty was a man in his prime, passionate and mainly sensible. He was already a celebrated author, a beloved husband and father, a good friend to many (and a thorn-in-the-side to some), and an aspiring entrepreneur and burgeoning global citizen and spokesman. His fiftieth was a year of milestones, too: he would publish in the United States his most famous work, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; in May 1884 he would make his first foray into the publishing business, founding Charles L. Webster & Co., which would make Huck its inaugural publication and publish for great profit General Grant’s memoirs a year later; in February 1885 he would finish a successful if at times straining cross-country reading tour with friend and odd-couple traveling companion, George Washington Cable; Oliver Wendell Holmes would mark the occasion of Twain’s fiftieth birthday by publishing in the Idler a celebratory poem matter-of-factly titled, “To Mark Twain—Samuel L. Clemens (on His 50th Birthday)”; and Twain’s beloved wife and his three daughters were alive and healthy. Just two years later on July 10, 1887, writing from Quarry Farm, Twain would rhapsodize about the good midlife he enjoyed: “This is a superb Sunday. . . . Livy is down at the house, but I shall go and bring her up to the Cranes to help us occupy the lounges and hammocks, whence a great panorama of distant hills and valley and city is seeable. The children have gone on a lark through the neighboring hills and woods . . . It is a perfect day indeed.”

Given the symbolic significance of life at fifty, it is appropriate that this volume of the Annual—our second under the aegis of Penn State University Press, and our eleventh under the stable hand of managing editor Jim Leonard—gives almost half its space to essays on that great work that marked Twain’s own semicentennial year. It is also appropriate to the ongoing aims of this journal that the essays included here continue to tackle the formal, intellectual, and political tensions and complexities of Twain, his age, and his works, especially Huck Finn. In a nod to Elmira, where Twain found midlife bliss and where he penned the bulk of Huck, it is appropriate to note that six of the essays presented in this volume were first presented as papers at the Seventh International Conference on the State of Mark Twain Studies, “One Man, Many Legacies,” which was held in Elmira in August 2013. The usual suspects were in attendance at the Elmira quadrennial conference, as was our old friend and colleague Hal Holbrook, who now has been playing Twain longer than Clemens played Twain. We also welcomed other old friends and many newcomers to the conference, including some who had traveled from faraway places like China, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, India, and France.

It was also at Elmira 2013 that we recognized former Annual editor Ann Ryan with the prestigious Henry Nash Smith Award, given in honor of her many years of excellent scholarship and dedicated service to Twain studies. Ann’s skillful and indefatigable work on the Annual built on the praiseworthy and essential work done by its founding editor, John Bird, who was recently elected president of the Mark Twain Circle, marking the end of Linda Morris’s successful tenure as...