Project MUSE®: American Literary Realism - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in American Literary Realism.daily12026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 40 (2007) through vol. 58, no. 2 (2026)Latest Articles: American Literary RealismTWOProject MUSE®American Literary Realism1940-51031540-3084Latest articles in American Literary Realism. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editor's Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975418
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"Honor knows no statute of limitations."Bob Hirst is such a modest, self-effacing fellow that he will no doubt cringe when presented with this volume of tributes. That's a risk I'm willing to take, however, in order to do not only what's right but also what feels like an absolute necessity. In his forty-five years at the helm of Berkeley's Mark Twain Papers and Project, Bob has tirelessly fielded the inquiries of countless students, scholars, collectors, general readers, and casual fans from around the globe, all curious to learn more about the life and legacy of this quintessentially American writer. No question has ever been too small or inconsequential: he unfailingly responds with patience, good cheer, and an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmallEditor's Introduction2025-11-26text/htmlen-USEditor's Introduction2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®48172026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Preface
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975419
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We all know the quote from Emerson that "An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man" and who can doubt that the Mark Twain Papers and Project is but the lengthened shadow of the inimitable Bob Hirst? To my mind, the MTPP is one of the great scholarly achievements of our time, providing researchers with the richest and most rounded portrait of Mark Twain imaginable. Not only has Bob Hirst gathered in a single place every scrap of paper written by or to or about Clemens and his family, but he and his staff have supplemented it with impeccable scholarly commentary that is invariably fair and accurate and nearly Talmudic in its depth of insight. In crafting my own biography, I always regarded Bob and the Mark
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmallPreface2025-11-26text/htmlen-USPreface2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®45122026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Building a Dry Stone Wall
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975420
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Having spent a year at the Mark Twain Papers as early as 1963–64, I first met Bob Hirst during a brief return visit to the Berkeley campus in the late 1970s. He was then a graduate student in the English Department, working alongside Ed Branch on the first volume of Early Tales & Sketches. Bob surprised me by confiding that he had read the manuscript (on deposit at the Papers) of my book, which was published in 1981 as Mark Twain and "Life on the Mississippi." In 1980, Bob succeeded Henry Nash Smith and Frederick Anderson as Curator of the Mark Twain Archive and General Editor of The Works of Mark Twain, and in both these capacities his assistance proved invaluable as I was seeing the book through the press from
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmallBuilding a Dry Stone Wall2025-11-26text/htmlen-USBuilding a Dry Stone Wall2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®56072026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Was that Redford? Bob Hirst's Career in Theater
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975421
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There are things you just wouldn't ask Bob Hirst to do: feed your cat, for instance, while you go off gambling at Tahoe for a couple nights; help put your boat in the water; come along to Costco in case you need a hand lifting that 85-inch flatscreen into your Crosstrek. He's too important for this sort of nonsense, too busy and decent and dignified. He's got Better Things To Do, and if you've spent any time at all at the Mark Twain Project you've seen him Doing Them.So it wouldn't even occur to you to ask him, say, to take a part in a play you'd written. Just the thought of approaching him about doing you this kind of favor would trigger whatever remained of your own sense of decency and you would back away from
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmallWas that Redford? Bob Hirst's Career in Theater2025-11-26text/htmlen-USWas that Redford? Bob Hirst's Career in Theater2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®119722026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26"Never Refuse to do a Kindness": The Quiet Motto of the Mark Twain Papers
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975422
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I first met Bob Hirst on November 22, 1988. I had arrived in Berkeley a few days earlier and had generously been allowed to take a seat in the reading room of the offices in the "old" Mark Twain Papers in Room 408 of the Bancroft Library. Supported by a grant from the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., I was in Berkeley to conduct research for my doctoral project, which depended on access to unpublished letters and other manuscript materials.I knew, of course, that Bob was the director and General Editor of the Papers and Project, but in those first few days I had no opportunity to speak with him or even see him. He was always the first to arrive in the office and the last to leave. During the day, he
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmall"Never Refuse to do a Kindness": The Quiet Motto of the Mark Twain Papers2025-11-26text/htmlen-US"Never Refuse to do a Kindness": The Quiet Motto of the Mark Twain Papers2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®159842026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Robert Hirst's "Simple Idea": A Brief Appreciation of Plain Text
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975423
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Scholarly editing is quiet work. It takes place behind the scenes, while emerging critical discourses and daring rhetorical interventions take center stage. Lately it has been conflated with left-or-right politics, burdened by demands for equity and more democratic, less authoritative conceptions of texts. Meanwhile, Robert Hirst has been hard at work curating the world's largest collection of Mark Twain manuscripts and editing every word the author wrote. His labors have not only served Twain scholars but also quietly maintained the art of scholarly editing for nearly a half century.The opportunity to sing the praises of a scholar like Hirst, whose infinitely curious, scrupulous, and creative editorial labors span
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmallRobert Hirst's "Simple Idea": A Brief Appreciation of Plain Text2025-11-26text/htmlen-USRobert Hirst's "Simple Idea": A Brief Appreciation of Plain Text2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®89422026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Grace under (Hydraulic) Pressure
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975424
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One scary morning from thirty years ago speaks volumes. Having flown to Berkeley from Chicago late the night before, I escaped early from some nearby motel and wheezed up the campus's immaculate green slopes, eager for a serene week of prowling in the Mark Twain Papers. As I came in range of the mighty Bancroft, however, I saw a cluster of emergency-cleanup and document-rescue trucks at the annex where the archive was then housed. Yikes! Sure enough, sometime in the preceding wee hours the top-floor's antique fire-suppression systems had misfired, soaking the attic rooms where thousands of manuscript pages, and letters, and other precious Mark Twain documents were stored.Figuring I'd be rightfully shooed back to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmallGrace under (Hydraulic) Pressure2025-11-26text/htmlen-USGrace under (Hydraulic) Pressure2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®65972026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26The Grand Panjandrum of Mark Twain Studies
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975425
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It was on June 29, 1992, or very shortly after that date, that I first met Bob Hirst. I remember the date because during that first meeting I happened to be sitting in Bob's office the moment he got a phone call conveying the sad news that Walter Blair had just died. I'm not sure if I then had any idea who Blair was, but thirty-three years ago there were a great many things about people in Mark Twain studies that I didn't know. At that moment, I was just getting started on my first Mark Twain book, Mark Twain A to Z, and was feeling utterly inadequate to the task. I hadn't written a word about Mark Twain since studying Huckleberry Finn in my tenth-grade English class and, as a matter of fact, never took another
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmallThe Grand Panjandrum of Mark Twain Studies2025-11-26text/htmlen-USThe Grand Panjandrum of Mark Twain Studies2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®95642026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Leading the Way and Getting It Right
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975426
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In the late 1950s, when I was ten years old, my parents gave me my first book. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn not only introduced me to Mark Twain but also had unanticipated consequences. It started me on a personal expedition to read every word Mark Twain ever wrote. That journey would eventually lead me to discover the remarkable Robert Hirst.My interest in Mark Twain took a sharper focus after I began my career as a medical school faculty member. I discovered that Twain wrote more about illness and medical care than I had realized. In Those Extraordinary Twins, for instance, he describes how the twins became progressively sicker during three days under a doctor's care, "but then the doctor was summoned South to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmallLeading the Way and Getting It Right2025-11-26text/htmlen-USLeading the Way and Getting It Right2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®141982026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26All right, then, I'll go to Hirst!
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975427
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You don't know about me without you have read a bargaphy book by the name of "Mark Twain: A Life"; but that ain't no matter. You probably wouldn't have knowed about "Mark Twain: A Life" if not for a jaybird named Mister Robert Hirst. Mister Hirst knows everything there is to know about Mister Mark Twain, and he helped me to know the rest.See, I'd never writ no bargaphy before. But I thought that me growin up in Twain's hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, might get me over. I might haul in twenty, thirty pages of quotes out of that connection alone. Yet by the time I got back there to interview him, he'd done already left town.Did I mention I'd never writ no bargaphy before? I'm a rough sort. Whenever anybody asked me
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmallAll right, then, I'll go to Hirst!2025-11-26text/htmlen-USAll right, then, I'll go to Hirst!2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®70832026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26To Bob Hirst: Not a § of Our Land Could Show His ||
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975428
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Although he generally deplored the literary use of puns, in his leisure hours Mark Twain enjoyed other varieties of wordplay where words were represented by visual signs—whether gestures, as in charades, or drawings, in rebuses. One rebus letter, written "for the children," survives in a facsimile printed by Albert Bigelow Paine. (Figure 1.)The document files of the Mark Twain Papers at Berkeley contain a couple of other examples of Clemens' enjoyment of visual puns—a mildly obscene rebus scrawled on an envelope, and a set of charades and rebuses (again somewhat racy) on the verso of a program from the SS Minnetonka on his return from London in 1907. Many years later, in his "Key to Signs" in his Pudd'nhead Wilson
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmallTo Bob Hirst: Not a § of Our Land Could Show His ||2025-11-26text/htmlen-USTo Bob Hirst: Not a § of Our Land Could Show His ||2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®67532026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Food for Thought at the Mark Twain Papers
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975429
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Probably everyone who has conducted research at the Mark Twain Papers over the past few decades has at least one Bob Hirst story, and the people who have worked most closely with him during his long and distinguished career no doubt have many memorable ones. My Bob Hirst story began over a decade ago. It involves the biggest Twain discovery I have ever made—no doubt the biggest I will ever make. And Bob Hirst played a big role in the story.In 2011, I was at the Papers doing research for a project of mine that is finally about to come to fruition: a micro-biography of Mark Twain in the pivotal year of 1884. I took a break from reading letters to and from Twain to begin research on another project: a Mark Twain
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmallFood for Thought at the Mark Twain Papers2025-11-26text/htmlen-USFood for Thought at the Mark Twain Papers2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®101922026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Navigating the River
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975430
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I first met Bob Hirst when we were both graduate students at Berkeley. My connection then to the Mark Twain Papers was through my professor, Henry Nash Smith, and included many hours of doing primary research for term papers in both the archives and the Bancroft Library more generally. And there, in the background, was the cub pilot, Bob Hirst, beginning to "learn" the river he would eventually master with remarkable success. As his original mentor noted, "Two things seemed pretty apparent to me. One was that in order to be a pilot a man had got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know; and the other was, that he must learn it all over again in a different way every twenty-four hours."1When I
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmallNavigating the River2025-11-26text/htmlen-USNavigating the River2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®77242026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26"Bob's Thread" That Made Me Cross the Pacific
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975431
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When I think about what might have happened if I had attended the conference that day as I usually did—simply listening to the presentations before heading home—I still tremble with fear. At the time, however, I had no idea that the "insignificant thing" I did would end up changing the entire course of my life. Looking back now, though, the facts were indeed just as they stood. I can see that clearly now. If I hadn't met Bob for the first time on that occasion, if he hadn't run into a little trouble, and if I hadn't happened to solve it, this fragile "thread" would not have connected him and me and my life would have been completely different. He is one of the few people who has changed my life in ways I never
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmall"Bob's Thread" That Made Me Cross the Pacific2025-11-26text/htmlen-US"Bob's Thread" That Made Me Cross the Pacific2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®91092026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Transatlantic Collaborations
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975432
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We are writing collaboratively to mark Bob's role in helping us as we prepared and published our co-edited book, The Letters of Mark Twain and Joseph Hopkins Twichell (University of Georgia Press, 2017). But we also use our initials to signal our separate—and always rewarding—experiences out at Berkeley with Bob and his great team. We wish also to acknowledge the work of our co-editor Hal Bush, now sadly deceased, in the preparation of the book.PM. I am pretty sure he will have no memory of this, but I first met Bob almost fifty years ago in 1978 when I was Visiting Professor and Fulbright Scholar at California State University, Sacramento. A still-callow 31-year-old lecturer at the American Studies Department at
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmallTransatlantic Collaborations2025-11-26text/htmlen-USTransatlantic Collaborations2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®134172026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26The Longest Way Around Is the Shortest Way Home
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975433
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On Martha's Vineyard, where my family has vacationed for many years, the locals have a wry, mildly derisive term for anyone not born and bred on the island: you're a "Washashore." It doesn't matter how long or how often you visit, or even if you own property there (alas, we do not)—you are forever and always an outsider. As fate would have it, I'm a "Washashore" not only on the Vineyard, but also in Mark Twain studies. I began my academic career as a specialist in modern American poetry, steeped in (and stoked by) the likes of William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens. My imagination ran to the heady days of the 1913 Armory Show when the European avant-garde took New York by storm and American
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmallThe Longest Way Around Is the Shortest Way Home2025-11-26text/htmlen-USThe Longest Way Around Is the Shortest Way Home2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®116092026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26The Oracle of Berkeley Visits Southern Maryland
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975434
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How does one meet Bob Hirst, get to know him and his work, and not become influenced by him? All contributors in this volume have their own Bob Hirst stories to answer that question. Mine begins in spring 2007, although I didn't actually meet Bob until a year later.As a newly promoted full professor whose scholarly pursuits lay in the field of rhetoric and composition, it now seemed professionally safe to try something else: teaching and writing about American humor and Mark Twain in particular. What better way to start than by offering a senior seminar on Twain? Circumstance placed the son of our college president into the class. The next link in the chain: a pre-spring semester college event, where our president
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmallThe Oracle of Berkeley Visits Southern Maryland2025-11-26text/htmlen-USThe Oracle of Berkeley Visits Southern Maryland2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®97102026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Finding Bob
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975435
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Bob Hirst trained me to put archival transcriptions in proper order. And much much more. With unfailing kindness and expertise, he taught me how to request and format letters that the southern writer Grace King exchanged with Olivia and Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and their three young daughters. I needed help and he provided it swiftly, cheerfully, and precisely.I had come upon King's correspondence in Special Collections at Louisiana State University during research for Southern Ladies and Suffragists, my 2014 book on the Woman's Department at the 1884 World's Fair in New Orleans. I knew that the seeds of King's literary career were sown from that event in her beloved city; however, I did not know then of her
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmallFinding Bob2025-11-26text/htmlen-USFinding Bob2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®78452026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26A Meeting of Minds
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975436
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As the new director of Elmira College's Center for Mark Twain Studies in 2004, my earliest acquaintance with Robert Hart Hirst was through the publications produced under his direction, beginning with the six stellar volumes of Mark Twain Letters. While so much of Mark Twain's writing inspires or entertains, his letters changed my life. When visitors to the Center would ask what my favorite Mark Twain work was, I would mention a few titles here and there and then conclude with the statement: "But I most love his letters." For me, Mark Twain's emotion, energy, and spontaneous word choice reveal themselves best there. Those six volumes of correspondence with his family, friends, editors, and business associates
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmallA Meeting of Minds2025-11-26text/htmlen-USA Meeting of Minds2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®146202026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Fact, Fiction, and the Fun of Lying to Bob Hirst
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975437
<p></p>
When I first visited the Mark Twain Papers and Project as a newly-minted Ph.D. in the mid-90s, it was a less polished, less tidy space than it is now. There were cramped rooms filled with books, and the stacks were illuminated by gaslight (at least that's how it seemed to me). Twain tchotchkes and memorabilia, Twain busts and dolls—some of them irreverently displayed—sat on top of bookcases. And file cabinets were pushed into corners—as were, for that matter, the hardworking editors—and there were drawers marked with dates and numbers, coded in ways I couldn't begin to understand. It was as charming as it was intimidating. There were other scholars at work, sitting at shared tables, looking intense. I tried to act
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmallFact, Fiction, and the Fun of Lying to Bob Hirst2025-11-26text/htmlen-USFact, Fiction, and the Fun of Lying to Bob Hirst2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®116062026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26A Sheaf of Recovered Mark Twain Letters in Honor of Bob Hirst
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975438
<p></p>
Transcribed below are parts or all of about fifty letters to, by, or about Mark Twain as well as an inscription by Twain in an autograph album, all new to scholarship.In an essay in the New York Independent in December 1869, the Brooklyn minister T. De Witt Talmage (1832–1902) reminisced about "a good Christian friend who, if he sat in the front pew in church, and a working man should enter the door at the other end would smell him instantly. My friend is not to blame for the sensitiveness of his nose, any more than you would flog a pointer for being keener on the scent than a stupid watchdog."2 Mark Twain read an excerpt from Talmage's essay in the Chicago Advance, a Congregational paper,3 and soon excoriated
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmallA Sheaf of Recovered Mark Twain Letters in Honor of Bob Hirst2025-11-26text/htmlen-USA Sheaf of Recovered Mark Twain Letters in Honor of Bob Hirst2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®1054922026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26Another Lost Mark Twain Playscript
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/975439
<p></p>
While living in Vienna between autumn 1897 and spring 1899, Twain was an avid theater buff and he experimented with writing for the stage. He penned Is He Dead? and translated or planned to translate other plays, including Theodor Herzl's Das neue Ghetto, Philipp Langmann's Bartel Turaser, and Ernst Gettke and Alexander Engel's Im Gegenfeuer. Charles Frohman considered producing the latter farce but concluded it was "all jabber and no play."1 Twain also began to collaborate with Sigmund Schlesinger on a pair of translations: Der Gegenkandidat, oder die Frauen Politiker and Die Goldgräberin. Most of these projects were abandoned, if started never completed, or if completed they have disappeared. As Thomas Schirer
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-19T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/379/image/coversmallAnother Lost Mark Twain Playscript2025-11-26text/htmlen-USAnother Lost Mark Twain Playscript2025-11-262025TWOProject MUSE®139042026-05-19T00:00:00-05:002025-11-26