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Reviewed by:
  • Mark Twain, American Humorist by Tracy Wuster
  • Linda A. Morris
Tracy Wuster. Mark Twain, American Humorist. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2016. xvi + 483 pp.

This is an ambitious book, and it accomplishes what it sets out to do—to explore in the terms of the time Mark Twain's changing and growing reputation as an "American humorist." From today's perspective Twain's reputation would not appear to be in doubt, but Tracy Wuster carefully shows that his status as a humorist was reflected and debated in literally hundreds of contemporary newspaper and magazine reviews and reports. This is the lasting contribution of Mark Twain, American Humorist.

Wuster confines his examination to the years between 1865 and 1882: from the time Samuel Clemens left California to the publication of The Prince and the Pauper, Twain's first solo-authored novel. One could quibble over his decision to end the study before the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but it is the author's prerogative to define the scope of his own work. As it stands, this is a hefty work of scholarship, and one could not hope for a study in greater depth. It references more than 170 newspapers and periodicals, and more than 250 books and articles. The footnotes alone fill 70 pages. Tracy Wuster is singularly well-positioned to undertake this work as a recognized Twain scholar and as an emerging leader in the field of American humor per se. He does not disappoint.

Wuster breaks his argument into eight substantive chapters, roughly following in chronological order Twain's work and reputation. But first he "sets the scene" (1) in a wonderfully clear introductory chapter in which he lays out the goal of the book and the terms in which he follows the development of Mark Twain's "cultural positioning" (10). Deeply embedded in this positioning is the mid-nineteenth century notion of a hierarchy of humor, from humor "of a low order" (27) to "literary humor" or "quality humor" (5). Mark Twain's path along this road was by no means a straight one or a sure one, as this book carefully documents. Of its eight chapters, three are concerned with Twain's reputation abroad, focusing on his lecture series and the publication of Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad. Much of the rest of the book focuses on Twain's personal and professional relationship with William Dean Howells and Twain's uneasy place among the literary elite.

Mark Twain's place among the American "quality writers" was never fully secure (139). Nor did he ever fully know his place there, as certain key words that appear throughout this study suggest: "anxiety" (29), "irreverence" (16), "imposter" (307), and "quality" [End Page 374] (363), as in "literary quality" (5), "moral quality" (363), and "quality humor" (5). One especially interesting term that the author cites a number of times is "racy" (36). It's a term Twain's reviewers used with some frequency, and as Wuster points out, its meaning then was not the same as it is now. In the nineteenth century it referred to the soil and to fertility, as in "of the soil." It appears to have been a term of approbation, and the author's emphasis on nineteenth-century terminology throughout the book brings this to the fore.

The role Howells played in furthering Twain's career has been widely discussed among Twain scholars, but I think it is fair to say that his profound influence on Twain's reputation has not been as fully explored as it is here. It is revealed to us through the extent that Howells promoted Twain's work through the Atlantic Monthly, the numerous reviews that Howells wrote of Twain's work, and the way Howells carried Twain into the very heart of the American literary scene. Wuster explores in new ways Twain's infamous speech at John Greenleaf Whittier's birthday in 1877, in which Twain represented three of the literary giants seated in the room as having been impersonated in a western miner's cabin by imposters. Twain (and Howells) famously came to believe that the speech was a major blunder and miscalculation...

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