Mark Twain

This is a rich year in Mark Twain studies, with two books that provide correctives to long-held ideas, an examination of Twain by philosophers, an important collection of letters, two books on Huckleberry Finn, and a wealth of articles, several of which should be required reading. Although his earlier works receive less individual attention than in most years, the focus on his later works is copious.

i Letters and Biographical Studies

The Letters of Mark Twain and Joseph Hopkins Twichell, ed. Harold K. Bush, Steve Courtney, and Peter Messent (Georgia), collects all the known letters from the 42-year friendship of Twain and his friend and pastor, documenting this seemingly unlikely but revealing and important relationship. The pairmet in 1868 in Hartford, when Twain was courting Olivia Langdon and endeavoring to reform and become a Christian, in which his new friend played a large role. The letters from the 20 years Twain lived in Hartford deal with the births of their babies, health and activities of their families, news of and gossip about mutual friends, talk of religion (not that prevalent a topic), talk of politics, Twain's writing, their reading, and humor, sometimes raucous, certainly on Twain's part but also at times from Twichell. For example, there is a June 1888 letter in which Twain remarks to his pastor what a shame it is that men do not have menstrual periods, so they could use them as excuses to get out of undesirable obligations. Notable is the one break in their friendship, in July 1883, when Twichell allowed the Hartford Courant to publish part of a Twain letter about his history game, which caused a breach of over a year. From 1891, when the Clemens family left Hartford for Europe, there were more letters than when they lived in the same city, and the tone takes a bitter turn after Twain's bankruptcy and the death of Susy Clemens in 1896. Twain's letters to Twichell after Susy's death are especially touching, a window into his mind and heart. The topics of the final years include Livy Clemens's failing health, her death, friendly sparring over "the damned human race," and discussions of anti-imperialism. This complete and expertly edited and annotated collection of letters takes its place with Mark Twain-Howells Letters and Mark Twain's Correspondence with Henry Huddleston Rogers, and in its own way, is more intimate and revealing of Mark Twain as a person.

Gary Scharnhorst's "A Second Samuel Clemens" (ALR 49: 180–81) discovers another Missourian named Samuel Clemens who also worked on the Mississippi River. His existence explains some anomalies in Mark Twain's biography, including several incidents wrongly attributed to "our" Samuel Clemens, such as accusations that he "had been a mediocre pilot, if a pilot at all." Moving to Twain's time in San Francisco in the 1860s, Nicole Amare and Alan Manning argue that Twain had a serious romantic episode in "The Mormon Entombed in Mark Twain's Heart: Ina Coolbrith and Samuel Clemens" (MTJ 55, i–ii: 159–92). They contend that Coolbrith, San Francisco poet and niece of Mormon founder Joseph Smith, broke Twain's heart after a failed courtship and engagement. Besides some cryptic comments in Coolbrith's letters, Amare and Manning's main evidence focuses on what they see as embedded Mormon references in Twain's works, evidence, they contend, of his lifelong regret over losing Coolbrith. Even the fact that he never mentions her, they say, is further proof of the affair. The argument is tenuous at best. In "A Space of Reconciliation: Mark Twain's Representation of Hartford, Connecticut, as an Idealized Landscape" (MTJ 55, i–ii: 145–58) Elizabeth Preysner examines Twain's attitudes toward Hartford in light of the urban pastoral movement of the late 1800s. "For Twain," she argues, "Hartford came to represent an idealized space of reconciliation, where industry and culture were united via a domesticated urban pastoral cityscape."

As he continues his biographical work, Scharnhorst presents "Mark Twain on the Brazilian Revolution: A Recovered Essay" (ALR 50: 89–93), an 1889 essay on the collapse of the Brazilian...