An Analysis of Mark Twain’s Use of Racial Terms When Describing African Americans

Various uses of “nigger,” “slave,” and related words in the Twain canon are offered here in a census table with special discussion of Twain’s use of racial language in relation to American society in three major works—Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, and The Gilded Age—and in the autobiographical reminiscence “Jane Lampton Clemens,” describing slavery and race in Hannibal, Missouri, in the 1840s.