Mark Twain at Home: How Family Shaped Twain’s Fiction by Michael J. Kiskis, and: Mark Twain and Youth: Studies in His Life and Writings ed. by Kevin Mac Donnell, R. Kent Rasmussen (review)

In his 1901 memoir recounting their friendship, William Dean Howells writes of Mark Twain, “He was a youth to the end of his days, the heart of a boy with the head of a sage” (quoted in Mark Twain and Youth, xix). Certainly Howells is not alone in associating Mark Twain with youth. As Kevin Mac Donnell and R. Kent Rasmussen assert in their introduction to Mark Twain and Youth: A Study of His Life and Writings, “Among major writers of the nineteenth century, no name is more closely associated with the concepts of youth” (xix). Both Mac Donnell and Rasmussen’s text and Michael J. Kiskis’s recently published Mark Twain at Home: How Family Shaped Twain’s Fiction focus on questions of youth, family, and domesticity in the author’s work, laying out important biographical and historical information, opening up new and provocative avenues of inquiry and interpretation. The two books are thus valuable additions not only to Mark Twain studies but also to larger discussions of childhood and home in nineteenth-century American literature. Moreover, both books remind scholars of American literature that humor can and often does intersect with the sentimental and domestic.

Mark Twain and Youth is the more wide reaching of the two books in terms of scope. Part 1, “Overviews,” works to position Mark Twain among the literature of the time and trace out Sam Clemens’s lifelong attitudes toward youth and aging. Here Lawrence Berkove’s essay on Mark Twain’s “fundamentally tragic” view of human life and “heretical version of Calvinism” stands out, as he argues that for Mark Twain, “the human race was damned, and . . . youth was included in the bleakness of his vision” (12). Part 2, “The Clemens Family,” as the title suggests, turns to the familial. A highlight is “Sam and Livy as Parents,” in which John Bird describes Clemens and his wife “as parents who were devoted to their children, with family life at the center of their marriage, and with an approach to parenting that shares more with the latter part of the twentieth century than the latter part of the nineteenth century” (63). Part 3, “Sam Clemens’s Life Experiences,” treats topics as diverse as the writer’s boyhood friends and, as detailed in Barbara Schmidt’s essay, his late-in-life “collecting of surrogate granddaughters” in a group he called his “angelfish” (137). Part 4, “Mark Twain’s Writings,” moves dutifully through the writer’s canon, with compelling readings of the major novels. Also of note is Linda Morris’s “Gender Bending as Child’s Play,” a nuanced reading of “An Awful—Terrible Medieval Romance” and “How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson.” Morris argues that these pieces illustrate that “even as he challenged and played with the notions of gender norms, his work also tended to reinforce conventional gender roles” (203). The final section, “Modern Perspectives,” includes perhaps the most surprising essay, Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s reading of Clemens’s life alongside that of Henry Dant, born a slave in Sam Clemens’s hometown of Hannibal, in 1835, the same year as Sam. Fishkin writes of the Dant family’s role in the 2013 opening of “Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center,” a museum dedicated to the black experience in Hannibal. In the aftermath of unrest in Ferguson, only one hundred miles or so from Hannibal, Fishkin’s reminder that the “intersecting, interlocking stories of [Clemens’s and Dant’s] legacies and their lives” will “shape how black and white youth . . . in the twenty-first century understand their community’s...